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!