Work in progress II / North Kingdom Showreel

We are almost done with our showreel. As usual it is hard to find time for internal project like this but here is finally some picture from the shooting which we did in Stockholm now before the summer. I worked as Art Director and David Grehn the Film Director, who was using the amazing RED camera. The model for the project was Emelie Fjällström.


Showing some work in progress of the flower. From early concept drawings to an almost finished 3D rendering.




I and Mathias Lindgren (our 3D Artist) did make the scenography by ourselves which was really fun!









A picture on myself and our beautiful model Emelie Fjällström from Skellefteå.

New stuff from North Kingdom

Two sites we released this summer:


Get That Look for JC Penny, USA. Photo by the great David LaChapelle.


Kiss Fight for Mentos.

Work in progress / North Kingdom Showreel

The last weeks I have been preparing a little for our new (and only) showreel. North Kingdom will turn 5 years this summer so I thought it could be a good idea to finally collect our work.


This concept drawing (which I have made with Poser & Photoshop) is showing how the dress and the main character will look like. The dress will be made by Omoi Form in Umeå and the horn will be built by Mats at Popcore Film.


Some rough first sketches for the storyboard. I have wanted to build a little story around North Kingdom instead of just showing all projects as all other showreels look like. The story is about our North Kingdom Godness who connects to our flower.


A first animated test of the flower from our 3D artist Mathias Lindgren.

Gold both at Clio & One Show

The last week our and GSP´s Get the glass where competing in awards shows around US for the last time. And it ends as it started; totally incredible. It has won every single competition it has joined. Winning awards should never be purpose of its own ofcourse, but still it is a good way to show that your company exist and it gives you more work. But most important is that the campaign actually are doing some purpose for the brand, and for Get The Glass it have done that to;

Visitors: 3,3 millions (9000 visits a day in average).
Unique visitors: 2,5 millions.
Time spent: 9 min in average.
Browsers: 63% IE, 28% Firefox

From where?
Direct: 37%
123spill.no: 170 000 visitors (5 %).
Minijuegos.com: 118 000 visitors.
FWA: 85 000 visitors.
USA dominates with 1,2 million visits, and then Norway with 250 000 visitors.

(Data from Feb, 2008.)




Clio Awards 2008 Miami Beach, 49th Annual; One Gold (Get The Glass for Animation), one Silver (Get The Glass for Brand Building) and one Bronze (The Coke Zero Game).

I had the chance to be in Miami Beach in person together with Roger Stighall and his wife Sofia which was ! In the ceremony, placed at the great Jackie Gleason Theater, I and Mike Geiger (from GSP) went up to the stage together which was something else! Great feeling to go up there! It was the first time I have actually went to an award ceremony, and I hope it won´t be the last ;)


Roger and I after the Award Show. BIG thanks to Mike Geiger and his very nice gesture when he told us to keep the statues! Thanks a lot! I hope to work with you this winter! :)

Great also to see that almost 25% on the shortlist where from Sweden.

The One Show 2008, New York; One Gold (Get The Glass for Microsites Corporate Image)

Sweden finished on third place after USA and Great Britain.

We won a Yellow & one Black Pencil!

The successful fairytale continues! Absolute amazing! Last night in London our gettheglass.com campaign we did with Goodby Silverstein & Partners won two pencils at the D&AD Awards. It is the third time in history an interactive project won a Black Pencil! It is little shame thou that we did not get so much cred at the ceremony as usually when we works with bigger advertising agencies. But still totally awesome! For GSP it was the first Black Pencil every in its 25 years history! How cool is that? GSP is one of the best agencies in USA today.

It is only the third time in history an interactive project is given a Black Pencil.

Personally I´m in Miami right now for the Clio Show so I missed the possibility to be in place but I guess it must been amazing. David Eriksson and Mikael Forsgren from North Kingdom where at place thou! :)

6 Black Pencils where given this night. iPhone and iMac was two other winners of this big price.


Mikael is so happy with his new friends!

North Kingdom & The 2008 Creativity 50

A couple of month ago we where included on a list I never had dreamed about.

"The list represents the biggest innovators of the year, who—through repeated demonstration of sheer brilliance or even just one spectacular feat—brought new spark to their respective fields of advertising, entertainment, marketing, technology, design and beyond."

Absolute amazing! A great award for our whole office! :D

The article of North Kingdom.
The article about Creativity 50.

North Kingdom & The Lodge

Forgot I did this one.. a showreel of Skellefteå from last year for The Lodge, a creative digital group in Skellefteå for the agencies there. Mathias Lindgren did the 3D and Dreamfield helped us out with some film & postproduction.

New stuff from North Kingdom

We have released some new stuff this spring from North Kingdom.




1) The Coke Zero Game.
2) A Glass and Half Full Production.
3) Toyota iQ.

Grand at New York Festivals

We won both Grand in the 2008 New York Festivals (NYF) Innovative Advertising Awards and also won Gold for Best Microsite. It is amazing how much good publicity this project have given us :) Unfortunately we did not have time for this years Got Milk campaign for Got Milk, but I hope to have the chance again next winter.

Here is an article in the Swedish Resumé for the awards.

D&AD Webjury 2008

This spring I had the honor to join the D&AD 2008 Website Jury in London. First two days of voting from home and then three days of voting and discussing at ExCel in London. It was a very inspiring and fun!



Over 29 other categories where on place during this D&AD Awards Judging Week, so I had a chance to check out lot of cool stuff.


Joakim Borgström, Oliver Payne, Flo Heiss and Benjamin Palmer.


Joakim Borgström (W+K) and Staffan Formsman (Forsman & Bodenfors) at St. John restaurant.

Coca-Cola Zero in progress, part II

The work with Coca-Cola Zero Germany continues... We are pretty much done now with all design work and post production, which Dreamfield helps us with. The work has moves on pretty smoothly. The hard work is to keep up the high quality through everything within all deadlines. When it comes to games it is much much more then just doing a campaign site. I wonder how the final work will turns out... if people out there will like to play it or not. The site itself is pretty classic, no specific new techniques or so. The idea was basically to make an interesting gamesite with a motion picture feeling. Some more stuff from behind the scene can you find here.

Anton Eriksson helped us out with the illustrations work as the one above. The idea was to combine his illustration style with our filmed sequences to get a feeling of a classic game/movie cover.


My reference material for the cover...


Mikael Forsgren in our conference room, going through one of the CCZ challenges. The photo is taken by my iPhone.. if you think the quality is crappy ;)


Work in progress. Here are some first screens from the interface. I am still working on different design solutions here but the overall feeling is correct.


Another illustration from Anton. Each game has its own Game Cover Art where the preloading parts are placed. “Jump Of Death" is the first challenge of four.


This is kind of material Anton could receive from me when he did the cover arts.


A first idea sketches of ”Jump Of Death”. The inspiration was taken from a crazy movie we found on Youtube called “Insane Car Jump”.


One of the cars we designed for the game. As we couldn´t use any existed models (it is lot of rights when you working with big names ;) our 3D artists had to develop new ones. Fun ofcourse... takes time? Yes! Do we have time? No...


An early concept sketch of the jump effects for our 3D artist.



The fire was made with a 3D program called Fumefx.


The challange “Jump Of Death” is all about jumping over a river with style, all to impress the ladies ;)


Game Cover Art for the “Freestyler” challenge.


”Freestyler” is the challenge where you are going to impress the girls in the lockeroom with your juggling skills. This screen is without color correction.



"Powerball" is a challenge where you has to kick through a wall with his football. The game itself is pretty much a classic golf game where it is about hitting the ball as good as possible. This scene is filmed in a local garage in Skellefteå and what you see here is some sketches how the game graphic will look like.


Vanessa Lindgren was our local star from Skellefteå.


The final challenge is a gigantic pinball game where you will unlock one of the goodness to get the final key. If you have succeeded so far you will be able to win tickets to this summer EURO2008! The style itself, the Grindhouse style, is taken from Coca Cola Zero´s TV commercial with the same characters.


"Extreme Megaball". The left pictures shows how the programmer works with the game structure. The right picture show the final design which I did in Photoshop combined with elements from our 3D artist. I wanted to make a very branded game field, not as a regular pinball game with lights and color everywhere. We played with explosions and fire instead which I hope will turn out well... Right now it is not finished but soon I hope ;)


The pinball itself was going to contain three mini games, each one related to the games you will see in the earlier challenges. Here is how “Powerball” looks like in this mini version alá "Extreme Megaball".





This sequence shows how one of the scenes are made, from the first storyboard through Post Production.




Showing how one of the end scenes takes form...


Wallpaper work in progress.





We also used Antons illustrations for the Game Tutorials, where you can learn how to play each game. Above you also see the rough first sketches and then the final pieces.


Just some form exploration of game graphic/icons.



Some more picture I took from the filmdays.





Some photos by Thomas Westermark. You can see David Grehn and Ted Kjellson is discussing the filmning and how strange it sometimes can be living up in north; the scene should look like a summer night but suddenly it starts to snow...






Here can you see Mikael Forsgren (North Kingdom) giving instructions to Joseph before his juggling scene, and how happy Clemens Dopjans from CCZ Germany was to be in Skellefteå!!

Rerform & Revolution

Andreas Philström(AD, North Kingdom) and I have just launched a design inspiration blog called Reform and Revolution with authors like Rob Ford (FWA), Chris Hewitt (dstrukt), Peter Jaworowski (The Hejz) among others. Here we will post and discuss stuff that inspire us :)

FWA Site Of The Year + People Choice Award 07

Shit! We did it again :D We won x 2!!

FWA Site Of The Year
FWA People Choice Award

"This is only the second time in FWA's history that the same site has won
both the SOTY and PCA awards, so huge congratulations!" - Rob Ford, The FWA

Last time we won the double was with our Vodafone Future Vision back in 2004. Amazing! I think I can quit now ;)

1 Year Long Global Competition
12+ million site visits
365 Site Of The Day Winners
12 Site Of The Month Finalists
1 International Public Vote
82872 votes cast
1 People Choice Award Winner

Comment from David Eriksson, CEO North Kingdom:

Holy Cow!

Getting the FWA PCA is from our view the greatest prize you can win. We have
always tried to put the users in the first room and this is a proof that we
have succeeded

It is also a recognition to the whole North Kingdom Team and a reward for
all the love and passion we put into our work.

Looking forward we will struggle to keep pushing the frontier of digital
media and make ourselves worthy of this award!

Here is a Swedish article as well by IDG.

New Art Director at North Kingdom Sthlm

Andreas Philström started to work for us for couple of months ago,located in our Stockholm office at Gamla Stan. He has updated his great portfolio Suprb.08. Cool work!

.net Awards 07 - Interactive Site of the Year

"The 10th annual .net awards are upon us. Who’s won, who’s lost, who’s the hottest property on the internet?"
North Kigndom was given the Interactive Site of the Year by the international .net magazine.

The award was again for our "Get the Glass" campaign! Awesome! :) Sometimes it is easy to forget all late hours you have spent in a project. If it was worth it? Well, that is another question... ;)

But still, it is always great to get recognition like that! Thank you .net!

North Kingdom is looking for talented people

As I am looking to re-locate to our North Kingdom Stockholm or Gothenburg office shortly, we need to find someone that can take my Art Director position and responsibility at our northern head quarter, where this photo is from. This is our good looking kitchen. There are also some other openings that might be of interest to you like Creative, Flash Developer, Information Architect, Production Manager and Account Manager..

Check here…

"We are looking for a lead Art Director to be one of the driving forces as we strive for creating world-class digital branding experiences for our clients. It is of greatest importance that you have a strong portfolio and love to be challenged by our creative team as well as our International clients."


Some of our team in Skellefteå... I'm the glad one in the middle with hat.

Build Your IQ, Episode 2 in progress

Right now our Stockholm office is working with the next episode for Toyota Europe´s project Build Your IQ. The filming was made here in Skellefteå at Film i Västerbottens green screen studio.


Our cute model, Matilda Månsdotter, from Stockholmsgruppen.


David Grehn (cameraman) is checking out the light and Daniel Illic (Creative Director, North Kingdom) wonders what he will eat for dinner.

North Kingdom goes Svansele

This weekend we went to Svansele Wilderness Camp, 60km from Skellefteå, with the whole team of North Kingdom and spent one night out in nowhere. We had no electricity, no running water and definitely no internet ;) but lot of fun!


Henrik, who was our guide and great chef, in front of David Eriksson and Daniel Illic.


Here did we spent the night...


Some of the team around the fire, drinking coffee with vodka ofcourse!


After a great dinner it was time for bathing! It was an awesome evening with cloud free sky and minus 20C.


Henrik Carlsson, Isak Wiström & Elisabet Halming in one of the three hot tubs!


Me riding down on the ice-slide.


Mattias Lindgren during the great reindeer dinner inside our cottage.


Roger Stighäll and Daniel Illic happy to survive the outdoor ice-sliding.

Coca_Cola Zero in progress, part I

For two weeks ago we had a big film week here in Skellefteå for an upcoming internet campaign for Coca-Cola Zero where I working as Art Director & Lead Designer. From Berlin we had Clemens Dopjans among others from CCZ Germany. I can not tell to much of the project yet but it includes the actors from the Coca-Cola Zero TV commercial.


Ted Kjellson from Direktör´n & Fabrikörn (Skellefteå) was hired as a Film Director for the project. I took some photos from the filmdays for our “Behind the Scene” section, and this is one of my favourites, showing Ted who just have instructed the girls in the “Lockerroom” scene how to act.


For the photos I have used my Canon 20D. The copy on the picture is nothing final, just something I have played with for now.


The scenography was excellent made by the team. The picture here above is showing my ugly rough sketch of the locker room turns out to be the environment above that one. That is cool :)


One of the days (or nights) we filmed in the garage of the “Brinken” building in Skellefteå. We had a cool car and good looking girls so what could go wrong? Would maybe be the timing in that case... We started to film around 10 PM and we where done around 4 AM. The car we used at the shoot was a Chevelle Malibu 1972. Awesome car!!


Joseph who is playing Tim, and who do not have a driving licence, enjoying his time in the car.


Ted is talking with Lotta and Vannessa in the background. Cassandra is focusing on her lines.


The idea I had of the girls dresses was to made something unique, clean and sophisticated but still feel as a soccer dress. I wanted to have some sort of a 60s - 70s feeling of the dress. The dresses were sewed by Helena from Umeå.



Early sketches of the cars which will appear in the game. We could not use any existing models so our 3D artists Daniel Wallström and Mattias Lindgren made up some new ones.




Some more pictures I took from the night in the garage. The happy guy on the wheelchair is David Grehn, our Camera man. In that scene we wanted a close up on Tim running. Old school solution always works :)




Some drawings from Anton Eriksson which we used for the storyboard.


Here is a shoot on Joseph from the scene you could see in Anton´s drawing. In the picture you can also see David Grehn and Thomas Westermark (Dreamfield).



Here is actually two pictures of me taken by David Eriksson and his Nokia mobile. Some days are more tough then others ;)

LIA Gold x 2

Together with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners we won two Golds Statuettes, at London International Awards with our Get the Glass project. What a year :)

Awards is not everything in the world but still, it is little sad that small creative agencies like ours never get the cred as we should have...

We also had a finalist with Vodafone Journey! Not bad either :)

New serie of nuns in progress

Why does time go so fast? I had totally forgot that I started to do some new nun illustrations last winter :/ Here is one of them, and absolute not finished. Based on a photography I have published here earlier. However, I hope to get some time later on to finish these. I have been experiment with some new techniques which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and Painter. However, I love doing this kind of job and now I will not forget these pictures ;)

North Kingdom goes fashion

This is a first glimps on our new fashion brand MINK / Made in North Kingdom where I have drawn the logotype in Illustrator. The hangtags (on the right side) is for the t-shirts and will be printed on canvas. The idea about MINK is for now to focus on designed prints, but we have lot of fun ideas for this in the future.


Logotype work in progress...


For a couple of years ago I started an internal project at North Kingdom where our different designers made their own version of our NK symbol. It turned out pretty cool actually! Here above can you see 4 of these t-shirts prints designed by Kenny Lindström, myself, Charlotta Havh and Bjarne Melin. More to come :)

North Kingdom interviewed by Computer Arts

"The tiny city of Skellefteå in the extreme north of Sweden is an unlikely place to find one of the world’s foremost web design agencies, and yet it is the spiritual home for the award-winning North Kingdom."

Cool interview by Computer Arts. Read more here; The online version.

Designchapel II in progress, part 2

I finished another background for DCHPL-2 this weekend. The illustration is painted in Photoshop, 9000 x 6300 px. My plan was to finish these in Painter but I have had to much problem with the sizes there so it will only be Photoshop work.


I have figured out that I work to much on small details. Details which you probably never will see in the final version on the web later on. However, it is fun to paint but I have to keep in mind that I should finish this project soon so I can move on with other fun stuff :)


Work in progress.

"The Hottest Digital Agencies Around"

Wow! Advertising Age has listed North Kingdom as one of the "The Hottest Digital Agencies Around".

"Despite waves of consolidation across the ad-agency business, there remains a healthy bunch of independent digital shops doing everything from search optimization to building web interfaces to simply doing damn good creative. Some of these shops are near-acquisitions for digital-hungry giants; others are adamantly opposed to becoming part of something larger, hanging onto the romantic notion of David vs. Goliath."

I am very honored! And I can tell you that we are not Goliath! ;)

Here is a note about it in the Swedish press: Resumé

Toyota Europe, Build Your IQ (Episode 1)

We from North Kingdom is for the moment working with a microsite for Toyota Europe called Build Your IQ. This is Episode 1 of 3. I have not been so much involved myself in this project (mostly very early concept work) but it is great to follow the process. This is our fourth project for Toyota.


The car itself has a very unique design. It is a small, very smart, city car with the name IQ. It is only 2,98 m long.


The room was built and filmed in Skellefteå.


Jakob Nylund (Art Director, North Kingdom), Rudy Boeman (Toyota Europe), Sonja Lakner (Project Manager, North Kingdom) and Daniel Ilic (Creative Director, North Kingdom).

Winner at Flashforward Film Festival

North Kingdom and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners won yesterday with Get The Glass at the seventeenth Flashforward Film Festival awards ceremony.

Lovely :)

North Kingdom at Hyper Island

We from North Kingdom will take care of one module at Hyper Island this winter. It is for there new one-year program called Interactive Art Director in Stockholm. We will give the student a Big Task (subject is still secret) among work shops, inspiration lectures etc. When it is finished we will gather the students work in a printed book. Can be pretty cool!




I had nothing to do last night so I did this illustration which I will use for a testprint for an internal book project.

Bak09 Interview

Here is some of the pages from the my interview in the last issue of Bak09 by Ozan Karakoç. Thanks a lot of the opportunity :) Bak is a great inspiration magazine so check it out!

Blaugallery III

I have done a new profile for my site Blaugallery.com which will have its third edition released this autumn. The new Blaugallery will have more focus on exclusivity with few artists, bigger frames and smaller limited editions.


The logo is made with pen on paper. Then I scanned it and finished it in Illustrator.