work and superlatives

New Year design hunting

2009-01-05T23:29:00.007+01:00

Spent a wonderful new year in London. The day before 2008 became 2009 we did some London wandering around and we found a store called CyberCandy close to Covent Garden and I found some very pretty boxes.

mad week

2008-11-11T16:22:00.003+01:00

Well it has been mad. Since Monday Cat, Ben and I have been in the office until midnight drawing, scanning, drawing again. We were here all weekend as well. But it was fun in a stressed out kind of way and it did pay off, nearly finished now.

Got this short mail from Mark who was in NY speaking to the client.
"Great work rebbeca ... Just so u know we just doubled your wages keep up the good work thankyou"

BEST FEEDBACK EVER

British packaging

2008-10-31T00:12:00.009+01:00

Well, the hunt is on! As always I am on the lookout for awesome packaging design and this is what I have collected on the precious occasions that I had actually brought my camera.

This is a delicious white chocolate powder for hot white chocolate. It is as delicious as its packaging.

On the same theme I found this jar of white chocolate buttons on my trip together with Cat to Chichester.

There were a lot of nice things in Chichester actually:

And some serial from the super market. cereal and chocolate, they do make the nicest boxes...

Dad visiting!

2008-09-24T23:43:00.003+02:00

Dad came to visit on the weekend and we met up in London for lunch and sightseeing. We went to a wonderful restaurant on what was called the Roof Gardens and there we had a fantastic lunch with some wonderful white wine called the Black Lagoon. He also announced that this was my birthday lunch (two weeks early) and gave me my birthday present, a brand new digital camera!

So now I can post the photos from the unusually sunny weekend with dad.

Finally got a table at the Roof Gardens and I got my camera!
Wonderful white wine, Black Lagoon

Tate Modern, more impressed with the building than the art.

Metro!
Sunny breakfast at home in Portsmouth, in the garden.

Walk along the beach
At the carboot sale (I bought a book)
Lunch at gunwarf
The TOWER
Me at gunwarf
Hooooover craft! (We took the fast cat, a more ordinary ferry) to the Isle of Wight
Dad at the sunny island before we started our hunt for scones.
Taking a beer break at the student bar called the Registry.

pics!

2008-08-07T23:53:00.006+02:00

My camera is, as you can see, complete crap (I only have my cellphone) but here you get some idea of our cramped little office looks!

Meanwhile in a small village called Emsworth...

2008-08-06T22:51:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I moved to the UK, to Portsmouth. It was weird and a little scary. Got up frightfully early, Jonatan followed me to the airport and kissed and hugged me good-bye. Then there was an air-plane, heavy bags and a train and dragging the bag to Liss Rd.

I was scared of fitted carpets in every room and the strange smell that they create but I was pleasantly surprised to find the bottom floor completely carpet free and two super cute and cuddly cats in the hallway. The upper floor does have a fitted carpet but that’s ok. It really is a lovely hose and I’ve got a nice room and a really great bed.

My landlord, Paul, is a great guy and he took me around town, showing me the different parts of Portsmouth, taking me to a bank to get an account, even taking me to the supermarket. We visited my second roommate Nadine at work, she works at an Ecco store here and hates it. But she is really outgoing and friendly and terminated to get me drunk during the evening when we went to the local pub (very British of us) and later when we sat in the garden.

I can proudly and smugly report that I was the only one not hung over the following morning even though I gave in to the friendliness and free drinks. One litre of water before you go to bed, that’s the very simple trick.

And this morning I went to work and it was great. I mean really. I was nervous and a bit insecure of course but it really worked out, everyone I talked to was funny, friendly and helpful. I worked on a t-shirt print for Artful Dodger and by the end of the day I was on the right track and feeling a bit proud actually.

There is talk of me maybe accompanying some of the others to New York for a week at the end of August and help paint some walls for a exhibition. That would be so much fun, I hope I can go.

So far the UK is nice and the people are great. The only thing I can’t stand is the water which is frankly undrinkable. Tastes like it comes directly from a swimming pool. But otherwise I am happy and I can’t wait until work tomorrow.

I think I am jinxed

2008-06-11T09:04:00.000+02:00

The way nothing is working out as it should right now is making me suspect that I am jinxed. Or maybe it is bad karma? In a few days time I have drowned and killed my cellphone, lost the receipt for it, managed to crack the plastic shell of my computer I don’t know how and I feel my expenses running away. Nothing seems to work, everything is hitting complications. Hope it passes over soon.

Shut in on a beautiful day again

2008-06-06T10:47:00.001+02:00

The fun and great Cooper Island project turned into a mess. I am now stuck with the very boring documentation of it and why it went so wrong. I guess this is a learning as well. It really sucks though, that it didn’t work out. I feel responsible, even though I think I know deep down that there wasn’t much I could have done. But I could have done things better.

On the lighter side of things, check out this blog if you haven’t found your way there already. Pure eye-candy; the dieline

Written during design-block

2008-05-21T11:15:00.001+02:00

Things are good. We are working on a very fun project for Cooper Island Beach Club, making there new website and logo. They are a caribbean resort so we spend much time looking at pictures of nice, sunny beaches.

The project is part of a module were we have put together our own agency, called Sushi Bomb. Not a very nice name, but for some strange reasons that was the one that survived all the discussions and sorting of suggestions.

The SVT people decided to run with OUR project! So proud! Still can’t show you anything here, but I am still very proud. I have worked for SVT, that is a big thing.

I’m looking for an apartment in Portsmouth at the moment, mainly through a website called easyroommate, a very good site despite it’s rather unfortunate name. But if you have any tips on where I can find a place to live I am grateful for all help I can get.

Update

2008-05-08T17:58:00.001+02:00

It has been a long time since I wrote anything now. It’s because of the London trip. We all went to London for our release party (I, Tove and Tilde arranged it by the way) and I really didn’t want to write anything until I could post pictures. But I still haven’t developed that one-time-camera and this is getting ridiculous.

So there is a few things I just have to blog about before they too are out of date. The first is that I have my internship almost ready. I am going to ilovedust, the coolest place in all the world. It is a bit to good to be true actually so I am secretly waiting for of to fall to pieces. But hopefully that day will never come and I will have the internship of my dreams. You should really check out their site, it is well worth the trouble of clicking on this link.

In other news I gave up on the technology specialisation. It was no place of beginners. And I am lucky that I did, because I got to work on an amazing brief from SVT, which is huge. We did an intro, end credits, breakers, game concepts, webdesign, logo, everything for their show Djursjukhuset. I am not sure I should be showing you any of the work, but we kicked ass.
I will find out in a few weeks if they will use any of it.

Love.

Asian stores

2008-02-19T09:22:00.002+01:00

The past weekend I went to Malmö, to Möllevångstorget, where the fun Asian stores are. Me, Jonatan and Sara walked around, buying both delicious and simply strange things, such as coffee flavoured peanuts and cola/banana flavoured jelly. I also took photos of some of the merchandise, simply for the love of comparing Swedish packaging design with the Japanese and Chinese.

For your enjoyment I have also thrown in what is currently my favourite package design, a couple of Chai Latte jars I discovered here in Karlskrona at the little teashop.

Game on!

2008-02-12T22:00:00.001+01:00

Specialization one is about to begin. Or has begun. I have chosen technology in a heroic attempt to improve myself and although I admit to having doubts about this choice (I am a designer, other people can do the damn coding for Christ sake!) I am now very happy. I am learning what I have always wanted to know, I am working alongside people I have wanted to try and work with and I am, against all odd, having a good time too.

I am really looking forward to starting my own small project and explore this strange concept of building a site. It will no doubt be challenging and difficult, right now I only understand every forth word people say, but at east I am grasping the main idea.

I am happy, I am evolving.

Best mag ever!

2008-02-07T13:28:00.000+01:00

If you are not already reading it, you should definitely check out PingMag, it is by far the best online design magazine I have come across. It has interviews with design agencies, artist and long articles about the use of strawberries in Japanese advertising.

My milk!

2008-02-07T08:54:00.000+01:00

Hey, found this in my local grocery store! This, ladies and gentlemen, is the backside of a milk carton I made last spring when I worked at Stenmark & Co. How cool is that?

My portfolio is up and running!

2008-02-01T10:21:00.000+01:00

Finally! My portfolio has been almost ready for so long that I began to despair but now it is finished! I am all happiness and sunshine. Check it out!

www.rebeccaberg.se

Perfection may not be everything

2008-01-18T10:29:00.000+01:00

…but I do refuse to publish my portfolio until I am satisfied with it. I can’t have people judging me by incomplete works now can I?

Things are rainy here in Karlskrona, at the end of the world. Rainy and windy. We are struggling with the class promotion site and it’s promotion. Not running smooth yet, but I really do think that the final outcome will be great.

Feel like I got lost in the organisation of the marketing groups, I was in the strict marketing of the site group, but I came in late since I thought that I might be in production. But that turned out to be false, so I was handed over to marketing. Where everyone had already started, forgot that I had joined, I didn’t get any information about meetings and well… In the end I wasn’t really in marketing anymore. Now I am going to be part of some sort of left over group, working on marketing ourselves. I should be trying to think positively and on all the things we might do, but I just feel depressed.

Not a very positive post, it might be the weather.

Coding might be my nemesis

2007-12-19T16:42:00.000+01:00

This is the last day in school; tomorrow I will go away for Christmas celebrating, family time and other nice things. I had hoped that I would somehow (I realize now that magic would have been required) be done with the coding of my portfolio so that I wouldn’t have to worry about that while stuffing my face with gingerbread.

But now there is only a few hours left and I am nowhere near finished. I am tired and a feeling of hopelessness is beginning to spread. I know what my portfolio will look like, I know how it will work, but I have no clue to how to make it work.

We also handed in our final decision on what specialization we would work on for 9 weeks next year. Fully aware that it would mean 9 weeks of solid frustration for me, I chose tech. Only a few hours of coding later, I am ready to kill myself.

Part of me knows that the reason I chose tech is so that I will be able to do these things in the future, another part if me wonders if I will survive…

Foiled by Flash!

2007-12-12T11:17:00.000+01:00

It’s sad, isn’t it? That even though I followed 5 different flash tutorials to the letter my short movie doesn’t work. I blamed the tutorials the first 3 times, but now I am not so sure. My hate for Flash increases.

This is the “portfolio” module, which means that it is both individual and probably loads of fun since we can do what we want. I still haven’t purchased my domain though, seems like such a huge decision. It will probably be rebeccaberg.se (.com was taken), but the fact that rebecca.com is free is nagging me a bit. Maybe I should go with just my first name?

Here at the end of the world (Karlskrona) all is well. Every window has the Christmas candles lit day and night, making the town glow and the advent feeling spread. Environmental thinking has no place when it comes to Christmas lights apparently.

Creative people

2007-11-14T15:47:00.000+01:00

All this effort, trying to think outside the box. Trying to be unique, go where no one has gone before. It seems all our lecturers are trying to tell us that the simpler the idea is, the better it is. But of course thinking inside the box would be the simplest solution? Can you tell I am tired yet?

I'd like to quote one of my favourite authors here;

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

- Terry Pratchett

Wrapping up and new beginning

2007-11-13T22:41:00.000+01:00

I have been bad at updating. As usual this has nothing to do with me having nothing to write and everything to do with the fact that a lot of things is going on and I don’t have the time to write about it.

Last week we made our pitch for the bank and the investors. It was more fun than expected, I felt so proud when we could actually answer all their questions. We almost got a thumbs up, they didn’t like that we had so many employees so they wanted us to limit our market so that we could cut down on them and by doing that, on costs. Of course.

It felt really good. Our prognosis on how much money we will make is a bit optimistic, but according to that we could all be millionaires in three years. Should we go through with it?

Now we have a new module; Visual Communication. The lecturers so far have been great, both entertaining and enlightening. Today we had a French guy by the name of Stevens Henri and his accent alone made his lecture worth attending. He went through the basic shapes and colours with us, a lecture that could have made us all fall asleep, we have all heard most of it before. Except we didn’t, that’s how good he was. Then he gave us brushes and paint and had us painting the entire afternoon. Can’t say I produced anything worth sowing to anyone at all, ever, but I have a feeling that wasn’t the point.

Autums are great for walks, walks are great for thinking

2007-10-23T13:38:00.001+02:00

New module, this time we will explore the possibility of earning embarrassingly large amounts of cash by finding and filling a need. New business idea time! I have a new group as well, Jocke (the captain), Tilde (doc), Isak (ship drunk) and Peter (we don’t know what he is yet). The most social group so far, we seem to spend a lot of time in cafés and last week we had dinner at my place. The social thing is important to me after the last module where I sort of fell in between groups so I have been pushing hard for the weekly dinners. The others have been pushing for the constant tea and coffee breaks, so we are all good.

I have been thinking a lot about branding these past days. Not so strange perhaps considering the module, I guess I get no points for creativity by Teo Härén (we had a seminar with him via videolink two weeks ago).
But whatever, I am thinking about it. So much that I went to the library and picked up “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, I haven’t started reading it yet but I am looking forward to it.

I love the library here, the way they actually have the books I want standing patiently waiting for me on the shelves… In Lund, a city full of students who haven’t given up on books the way these digital media students have, the books I wanted were never in. Here I seem to be the only one visiting the library, which is both sad and practical.

But back on track, I haven’t come to anything that might be considered a conclusion with my thinking so far, but I do have a video for you guys. Microsoft made it, probably to get management to stop butting in on all their good ideas…

Frustration land

2007-10-04T10:37:00.000+02:00

There is frustration in the air, it has been there all week and it is slowly driving me mad. Nothing works, if feels like all I do is wait. I can’t go anywhere cause something might happen, I might be needed, I can’t let these people down. We have so much to do, but we never seem to have all the components to actually be able to do it. It is so frustrating and so maddening.

We finally got a Printfabriken as a sponsor for our print yesterday. A huge relief I tell you, we had just about decided to just print everything here at school and were all very depressed when they called me back. But now everything is jammed again (of course) because there is no communication. Not one that works anyways. Not between us, the press group, and the design group; responsible for the poster design, and not between us and the teachers; who are away in Stockholm and has to clear everything before we go to print.

Now I am going to get the press release done at least, although I have no great pictures to put in it, not even after both mailing everyone about it, and asking around. But then my mail have been bouncing mails for some reason, so a lot of mail have probably been lost.

I am not in a happy place right now.

End and new beginning

2007-09-25T23:33:00.001+02:00

We had our presentation today; it went rather well I think. I think all the groups did a great job, everyone has really gotten better at presentations, better rehearsed, better PowerPoint presentations, more structure. The feedback afterwards still needs working on though. We also got our new assignment, to make an interactive exhibition with sound and light. None of us know anything about the technique so right now it feels a bit hopeless to be honest. We will also set up a group blog that I will link later, a magazine and a lot of organisation…

Today I put up some inspirational links on this blog, this if from one of them, Peter Callesen, a great paper artist.

Baby Steps

2007-09-24T23:22:00.001+02:00

We are pretty calm over at Hyper at the moment, presentations tomorrow but this assignment was only a worm-up really so everyone is taking it easy.

We had a lecture today; Mattias Nygren and Magnus Giritzlehner from GamePort. It was fun to talk to people from the gaming industry, which I find rather interesting. They showed us movies from a game called The City of Metronome (which, by the way is the first google suggestion when you have typed “the city of m”), and it is wonderful. This is not the best trailer, but the only one available on the web at the moment. God, I hope they will get the funding to really make it one day.

In group news we have actually rehearsed and timed this presentation. That is a first. We are taking baby steps towards perfection.

Experience Technology

2007-09-19T21:00:00.000+02:00

New module this week. Today Jonas Stangel visited us, a product designer that introduced us to the art of designing objects, real things, not just design on a screen but toasters and drills as well. It was fun and interesting, it is always exciting to see design of products that never reached or have yet to reach the market. Or just look more closely at the design that did make it, but whose geniality you never really considered. Got some nice tips about the thought process and some inspiration about what to do with our current object designs.

This is a Ford Concept Car he showed us, designed by Mark Newson. If I could drive and had the money, I would buy it just because of the trunk.

End of Information Society

2007-09-13T21:37:00.000+02:00

Hours and hours of presentation today, not surprisingly everyone was very tired at the end. I got myself an awful headache. Being locked in a dark room with no air and a big, shining screen makes my migraine come forward. But no more complaining now.

The presentation was rather mixed, some was really good and informative, some were funnier than others, some really made you feel sleepy. I was rather disappointed in the group that had the British Isles, they mostly talked about the other media, an agency whose founder we already talked at length to. No information about Scotland or Ireland.

The Scandinavian group was great, as was the one that had Africa and the Middle East.

We got a lot of positive feedback, which felt great. Our presentation focused on Japan and Singapore, and so other countries had been pushed back. That decision had been necessary, it was very difficult to find information about agencies in the two countries we choose. But that suddenly seemed such a poor explanation.

Our written presentation took a beating though. And rightly so, we had not understood the assignment. Ah well… We live and we learn. We weren’t the only ones that had missed some of the finer points.
But all in all, our presentation got a good reception and I think we really did a good job.

Kong and guilt-ridden thoughts about advertising

2007-09-12T10:28:00.000+02:00

Some words about Kong, who kindly came to see us, to talk to us and to et us to soncider an internship with them on their newly founded agency. Them, in this case, are Jacob Vijn (creative director) and Sean Chambers (planning director).

They came last Monday, but Monday was hell day motion wise, so they didn’t get the attention they deserve in my blog at the time.

Anyway, they said a lot of interesting things; they talked a lot about the values by which they were going run their agencies. That was interesting since we are working on our own values for the class at the moment. Personally I thought they had a bit to many of them, I like it when you have just a few words to always keep in mind, instead of a long list.
The first one was about trust; “hire people you trust, trust the people you hire”. This is important but hard, I have never hired anyone but to know if you can trust him or her after a few interviews must be close to impossible. The second thing I really took to heart was “add value to the web”, there is a lot of crap out there. It goes together for me with “do work that has real value”.

And this I want to talk more about. Value is important to me. During this “lecture” I got the distinct impression that many in our class (I do not say all, but the part of the class that made the most noise certainly) is interested in money above anything else. They do not really know yet what they want to do, but they want to make money while doing it.

I on the other hand am suffering from moral qualms about the whole industry sometimes, but mostly about advertising. Most of us will end up there, or so it feels, in the countless agencies around the world, tapping into our minds to make us desire things. In an industry who’s job it is to sell people things they don’t really need, adding to the materialism and exhaustion of this planets recourses. That may be taking it a bit to far; I am exaggerating a bit to get my point across here.

I talked to Jacob about this after the lecture and he said that the only way of avoiding the guilt is to do things that you feel have value. It might be doing a campaign site for the Red Cross, or it might be constructing a function that will make things easier for its users, but it need to have a real value.

And I think he is right. To do that with every job you get might not be possible, but I will try. And I will also try not to end up in advertising.

This is Hyper Island calling...

2007-09-11T09:28:00.000+02:00

We started calling at 6 am, which is about two – three in the afternoon over in Japan, and slightly earlier in Singapore. Both Johannes and Alva faced their demons and picked up the phone today. The recording worked this time around as well, which was another plus.

I did what I think was a very good interview with Chris Lee at “The Asylum”, we talked a lot about trends and digital design in Asia. It felt really good. All my interviews with these slightly smaller agencies have been good I feel (and by small I mean that they don’t control 30% of the market), but with the larger ones (like Dentsu who do control 30% of the market) it is just hopeless. All you can hope to get out of the poor, confused secretaries is a more personal mail address than that for general inquiries.
Now we will start to work on our presentation.

Motion, motion, motion

2007-09-10T22:45:00.000+02:00

Last Friday was presentation day for our motion. Despite some technical difficulties at the beginning the reception was good. Some pointer to think about, mostly about body language. It felt great that they liked it as much as they did; there was a lot of really good animation being presented. I was surprised and amazed at the variety of ideas.

And today was the personal 15 sec motion deadline. And I failed to turn it in on time. I was very disappointed, partly of myself partly of the circumstances. I had thought I could work in After Effects but because of circumstances out of my control, I couldn’t. So I was forced to rethink everything in the last minute. And of course I screwed up and didn’t save as often as I should have and lost many hours of work. I felt so tired and stupid.

Well, it is handed in now; I learnt a lot about Flash thanks to Tore who helped me. And even though it wasn’t carried out in a very good way, I feel I had a good idea, which I could have realised. I am disappointed that I didn’t but hey, that is life.
I am impressed with a lot of the motion I have seen from my fellow classmates so far. And by how helpful they can be even though they have their own problems.

Ah... I love the smell of deadline in the evening

2007-09-06T21:26:00.000+02:00

It’s a cold and clear deadline night and there is that certain buzz that only people on a deadline, long after they usually go home and it is dark outside, can produce. Most of us aren’t very useful, just hanging around in case we might be, supporting the ones still struggling.

We are doing an animation in After Affects, I have done frames of moving hands and brick walls, and all the key frames of the little white gnome-thing and now I am just hanging around, waiting for the whole thing to be put together. I am very curious to see how Kasper has managed to time it, and how Johannes and Fredrik’s sound effects will match the whole thing. I am a bit afraid that they will sound to videogame like…

Alva helped me do the last frames, something I am very grateful for, might have cracked otherwise.
And now there is only waiting. Tomorrow we will hold the presentation, and then I will spend the weekend trying to make my own 15 sec piece.