Last Instinct

For the launch of the new Jeep Cherokee in 2008, I made a frontflash and a spot for the campaign at Basilicon.

The main design and animation was made by me, but I got some help from Anders Ekström, who really wanted the leopard to jump in from the right. Since we only had a leopard laying down, we had to fabricate the jumping leopard.

This was my first big campaign when I started working at Basilicon in 2007. Jeep had a collaboration together with the wildlife park Kolmården where Jeep sponsored a terrain driving track. We made the campaign site and also the booking system, which my boss Anders Ekström put lots of energy into.

I directed the art and programmed most of the flash interaction and the implementation in HTML. I worked together with David Andersson in designing all the sub sections. The main design was formed as an old map with a little Jeep as mouse pointer. The little car was actually the hardest part to get to work correctly.

The technical solution for the window was really cool, since most of the campaigns back then used rather annoying popup-windows. This was made as a layer with transparency and shadows in flash instead. This wasn’t really possible before that point, since Safari on Mac had terrible and very buggy support for this. Fortunately, Firefox had just gotten better support for it. The web support have really developed a lot on Mac in the three years since then!

This was a project I made together with Danny Gomez in 2008 at Basilicon. Duni wanted an interactive product presentation for their customizable transparent plastic salad bowl. I made the design, the text & logo effects and interaction flow, while Danny made the 3D-model and animation. I think we got a realistic and really interesting presentation of the product.

I found some amazing colorful wallpapers in a theme pack for Windows 7 called Surreal Territory by Chuck Anderson of NoPattern. He has really done a lot of great colorful designs! I got a bit inspired to make something similar. So I took one of my photos from Skanör last weekend and made a truly colorful sparkling sunset! Feel free to download it as a wallpaper or something. =)

In a school project I had now, we were supposed to make a simple animated link button with a sound using Flash (really not very difficult). Well, I felt like doing some graffiti to get some bonus out of it. The drawing functions in Flash are actually pretty good for fast graffiti production.

Color is maybe the strongest trend of this year. Strong, vivid colors is the thing to look for and be inspired by. Just try to look beyond the basic colors and look for those who are not obvious. Well, the obvious will work great too, but my point is that there are a lot of colors and color combinations that we don’t think about right away. And yeah, you have to combine them with strong contrast in any way you can think of. If you need a tool for it, Adobe Kuler is the way to go.

Here are a couple of sources for inspiration:

The Dance by Tony Ariawan

Paradise Typo by Xaliber

Virtual Sky Studio

Size Matters Poster by The Steve Angello Team

Brofäste by Johanna Holmblad

You can also try my Channel Colorizer to put some color into your own images.

I found this amazing remake of a very classic label, the Chiquita banana. The design is made by DJ Neff and it’s just so inspiring. Simple and beautiful. You can read all about it in an interview on design:related or in the article at Cap&Design (swedish) or make your own sticker and share it using facebook connect on the cool campaign site. The interface of the sticker designer also features the same techniques as used in the award-winning campaign I did for LdB in late 2008.

Feel like sketch, paint, tag or doing some graffiti? Try this cool onBoard collaborative painting and drawing application made by Jozef Chút’ka. It has a really powerful sketch tool that seems just magic. And yes, this sketchboard is shared by everyone.

In my previous post about the new logo I made for Helsingkrona Gille, I mentioned that I also made a little brochure. Well, that little folder is now being posted by plain old physical mail to about 800-900 people. So I thought I should put it up here as well. None of the pictures are actually mine but the logo and the layout is all done by me.

It took a couple of nights to complete, but it got a little more ambitious than what was expected, so everyone was happy with the result, from what I’ve heard at least. =)

(The thumbnails below are cropped)

The blog has gotten a facelift to match this great year of 2010! The previous style was a bit boring and outdated. I think I will change it a bit more, but this will do for now. =)

The style is based on the Pixel theme by Sam and you can get it at his site 85 Ideas. I think it really captures many of the trends for webdesign this year and I really love it!