Working with 3 Dreams of Black was an amazing team effort and a result of true collaboration. So many great minds worked hard together cross borders of both expertise and disciplines; spread across the globe we formed a rare creative joint venture that brought Chris and Aarons wonderful visions to life.

Part of the goal was to move and inspire the creative community. Therefor it feels extra good to receive the FWA PCA 2011.

A big thanks to everyone involved making this happen: Chris, Aaron, Doob, Sandra, Thomas for giving us the opportunity. Special thanks to Branislav, Eskil, Bartek, Micke, Klaus and the rest of the guys involved pushing the limits. Full credits here – each and everyone on that list deserve a shout out for being so dedicated.

Also a huge thanks to all the people who voted.

We are all super happy and amazingly proud.

Read more about the project here and about the award at The FWA here.

Earlier this year we got the honor to design four FWA awards certificates. FWA has also a Mobile Of The Day (MOTD) award which we now have designed and delivered to FWA.

(Vodafone BufferBusters is our first MOTD by the way.)

Test prints on the earlier certificates; SOTM (Site Of the Month, SOTY (Sity Of The Year), PC (People’s Choice) and SOTD (Site Of The Day). FWA have a gallery on their website where people can upload and show their awards.

The famous FWA digital award ribbons are vectorized and placed in the lower right corner of the prints.

The basic idea was to make something that would look good on your wall, and even better, if you would have a collection of several certificates. The typeface and the design are taken from the FWA digital award ribbons, which made me start thinking of knitting, which also looks like pixel art in a way. Both knitting and pixel-art is handcrafting, which matched the idea perfect since the winners of FWA awards are filled with both love and care for the craft.

I had the pleasure of holding a lecture + workshop about typography with the IAD students over at Hyper Island Stockholm earlier this week. We talked about the history of type and some basics when it comes to creating a typeface – what to think about, what tools to use and so on. The task they were given in the end was to create a typeface in 24 hours. I’ve included some of the creations in this post, but make sure to look at them all at http://hypertypography.tumblr.com/!

North Kingdom is very involved in the eduction over at Hyper Island. We love to share our knowledge and help the next generation of creatives. Our creative director Daniel Ilic helps Hyper Island to tailor each years educational programme and earlier this month our IA Alfredo Aponte held a lecture about interactive interfaces and how animation can be used to create a better experience. (the presentation can be seen a bit further down on this blog.) Robert Linström, our Senior Art Director and co-founder, did an inspirational talk about the work we do and how we do it. In January our technical director Daniel Isaksson will do a talk and hold a workshop about technology. Apart from lectures we are also mentoring the students. We meet up with them in smaller groups discussing the work they are doing and giving them feedback and how they should move on.

You can read more about Hyper Island here, http://www.hyperisland.com/

Niklaz Lönnqvist- Pumps and skinny jeans

Feeling Horny Alphabet

Luis Carlos Marques

Reidun Solvik

Antonio Ceballos

Sara Frank

Pauline Säll

3D and motion graphic has been one of our five core competences since the start and is an important tool for us in our work in creating immersive storytelling for our clients.

You can see the whole presentation here in two parts:

An Evening with North Kingdom (Part 1)

An Evening with North Kingdom (Part 2)

Last week I was invited by Henrik Wrangel from Doberman to give a lecture about interactive interfaces and how animation can be used to create a better experience for his Interaction Design class at Hyper Island. In return, I was happy to accept the invite and was eager to explore the idea further because I wanted to challenge the reasons why animation is even needed.

So, I spent a few days breaking down the topic and quickly landed on some fundamental elements about design, cognitive behavior, and natural human characteristics. Before I knew it, I found myself flipping through old notes from Donald Norman’s book, Emotional Design. In the end, everything began coming together as I knew I wanted to address the topic from the product’s personality perspective and how we as humans naturally behave.

As you can and may see… I had a lot of fun with the topic. I just wish their was an easier way to capture all my thoughts and discussion points outside the deck for you to follow because I use the visual slides as supporting content to what I was discussing, acting out, or improvising with the audience. So, I tried to add a “closed caption” aspect on some pages to help explain a few points. Furthermore, some pages have small titles at the top that point to hyperlinks if you wish to see the full video reference.

We recently helped our friends over at Glue Isobar London to produce a charity site for the British Heart Foundation. A zebrafish can repair damaged pieces of their own heart if it gets damaged, and scientist believe that if we study them they could make that possible for humans too, which would save thousands of lives. So support this great cause and add your own zebra fish to the fish tank and spread the message of hope!

Add your own zebrafish

Some behind the scenes:

We helped BBH London to develop a iPhone based game app for Weetabix called “Weetakid.”

The game sees users take control of Weetakid, a happy and lovable yellow creature whose magical world has been robbed of all its energy by the Evil Eater, the galaxy’s villain. Weetakid and his sidekick Nibbles must then go on a quest to retrieve the items stolen by the Evil Eater.

An AR marker printed on the back of Weetabix will enable kids to fuel their Weetakid character for game play by feeding it a bowl of Weetabix every morning. At a certain point in the game, players are prompted to point their device’s camera at the back of the Weetabix Yellow Box. The game then launches into an augmented reality sequence whereby Weetakid appears.

Download the app and try for yourself here!

Vodafone wants to position itself as the fastest network in Germany against its competitors. So we created a fun and engaging location based AR mobile gameplay that helps Vodafone manifest this.

The story revolves around so-called Buffer Monsters that represents everything slow in your everyday surroundings; the goal is to capture these monsters by using a smart phone and dumping them in Vodafone Stores or online.

The best hunters will win a lifetime plan of free data and phone calls and every week smart phones are given to the ones with the highest score.

Let the hunt begin!

http://www.vodafone-bufferbusters.de/index_en.html#index

Partners: Hello Future, DinahMoe, Monterosa, Agigen, EOL Intermedia

Job openings in Stockholm
Senior Producer/Project Manager:

We’re looking for an experienced online producer/project manager to join our team in Stockholm. To qualify you need to be a very driven producer/project manager, have a deep understanding how quality and creativity makes a difference in our media, and most of all be a great teamleader.

Senior Art Director

We have a position open for an experienced online Art Director. Besides creating great work you need to be comfortable with leading project teams and participate in pitch work for our clients. We expect to see a stunning portfolio from you if you apply.

Creative Technologist

The demand for creative and clever use of technology is bigger than ever before. If you can combine expertise skills in the latest web and mobile technologies with innovative ideas you are the right person for this role. We expect you to have at least 3 years experience and a strong portfolio.

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Job openings in Skellefteå
Producer/Project Manager:

We’re looking for an experienced producer/project manager to strenghten our team. To qualify you need to be a very driven producer/project manager, have a deep understanding how quality and creativity makes a difference in our media, and most of all be a great teamleader.

Designer

We are looking for a good  and passionate designer to strenghten our team. Besides creating great work you need to be comfortable to team work. We expect to see a stunning portfolio from you if you apply.

Mobile Developer

With the rapidly increased demand for mobile applications and web apps, we want to add a new technical team member. If you can combine expertise skills in the latest web and mobile technologies with innovative ideas you are the right person for this role. We expect you to have at least 1 years experience, a strong portfolio and a passion and hunger to assure North Kingdom can stay in the forefront of mobile development for many different technical platforms.

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We are an international team and speak english in the office, so you can come from any part of the world.

You must have:

- 3+ years experience in high level interactive project management.

- Proven client and team management expertise.

- Client management and account management experience.

- We like it if you have experience from agency work.

Skill, curiosity, and passion for the digital media is obviously crucial, but your person, approach to work and teamwork capabilities will be very important for getting the work. If you engage every idea with the question “How would we make this happen?” you are perfect for the job!

The position is a full-time position open for our Stockholm office and starting as soon as possible.

Does it sound interesting? Please submit your application including detailed resume to: jobs@northkingdom.com

We’ll contact you if you seem to have a matching background!