Jakob Nylund - feature & interview

Jakob Nylund (*1982) is a talented interactive designer from Stockholm, Sweden. After graduating from school (Nature Sciene with Music and Media focus) Jakob worked as a freelance designer for several studios. In 2003 he joined the Hyper Island program and specialized in Design and Project Management. He was a member of the Crew9 and his mandatory internship took him abroad to the UK, where he started to work for de-construct.

In March 2007 Jakob Nylund joined forces with the scandinavian Lords of Creativity and became Art Director at one of the world's most respected web design studios namely North Kingdom. Jakob's elegant personal portfolio FORMCONSPIRACY was featured on spyline in February 2008. Furthermore he is involved as an editor in the design blog No legacy and in the design portal Reform & Revolution - which happens to be everybody's darling right now.

Jakob lived and worked a while as sort of an 'creative outpost' in London for North Kingdom. In 2008 he was speaker at European Design Week in Stockholm and Semi Permanent in Sydney.

A: Hi there! Glad to be featured here. There's been quite a lot going on recently, mostly in my private life. I'm taking a year off work at North Kingdom to go to my girlfriend in Sydney where she studies. What I'll be doing there I'm not sure about yet, maybe freelance or find a job somewhere, we'll see.

A: I was a member of Crew 9 and I graduated 3 years ago. Hyper Island is fantastic, great environment to be in, great teachers and an interesting mix of people. But it's also what you do with it, there's other schools out there that probably teaches you more hands on stuff, at Hyper you need to take your education in your own hands, they give you the tools and you use them in the way you want to use them and it's your job to find out how to use them too. Hyper Island is also very much connected with the industry, and the placement is a big part of the education. But it's more than just work too, you also grow as a person in many ways, sounds a bit cheesy and pretentious, but it's true. Everyone that starts at Hyper goes through a course in group dynamic, and there you also find out a lot about yourself. It is a method that was developed by the Swedish Army actually, where teamwork is crucial, as it is in this industry.

A: It was great, i learnt most from this experience. I joined de-construct in London and Alex Griffin and Fred Flade, creative directors of de-construct, taught me loads. Fred is an extremely talented creative, with a fantastic eye for typography amongst loads of other things, and Alex always comes up with new fresh ideas and designs out of the ordinary, Vitra.com for example. So you could say that Fred taught me the rules and Alex taught me to break them. He also broke me in Quake.

A: It was fun of course, but when I applied for work at that time, I didn't have any thoughts about working at an agency with a great portfolio that had won loads of shiny awards, I just wanted to work somewhere where I felt that I belonged on a personal level. I had been in London for 3 and a half years and felt a bit lost. North Kingdom has a very humanistic approach and they see to the persons needs before work. If there's any kind of problem, the partners try to find a solution for it. It's like a big family. I respect and admire that more than any award in the world.

A: Been 1 and a half now, it's been great. It's been challenging and demanding, but extremely fun. This past year has been the busiest so far, traveling a lot, experienced a lot and grown a lot on lots of levels. Been the best year in my life so far, but also the toughest.

A: Haha, that was scary. It was actually my first time talking in front of an audience, except when presenting for clients of course. But it was 2500 people at Semi Permanent and I was so nervous and that showed. But it was a great experience, maybe the talk wasn't the best one in the history of talks, but I did my best. But now when I've been out a few more times presenting it's much easier and I now think it's fun too - not scary. If you have talked in front of 2500 people - 150 doesn't feel that much.

A: Like I said before, when someone has a problem, the partners at North Kingdom tries to find a solution. My girlfriend lived in the UK, we hooked up when I was in Sweden. And a long distance relationship doesn't work, so I had to move over, so I resigned but was given the change to still work for North Kingdom, but from London. So I rented a desk space in the heart of Hoxton Square in Shoreditch and kept on working as normal.

A: Joseph Müller Brockman, Robert Lindström, James Widegren, Alex Griffin, Fred Flade, Alex Trochut, Max Miedinger, Experimental Jetset, Jonathan Harris, Massimo Vignelli to name a few. There's a lot of people I respect and admire.

A: Wake up, snooze, wake up, snooze, wake up, shower, grab a coffee on my way to work, set up my laptop, check my emails, put on some nice music (currently The National Bank and Sebastian Tellier), work, brainstorm, meetings, lunch, coffee, work, go home, work a bit more and finally fall asleep to a good movie. I need to bring in some exercise in the routine at some point, my belly is growing in an alarming rate.

A: Oh tough one, I don't really have any specialities - I like to do a bit of everything. But I like typography - maybe because I suck at illustrating.

A: Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and After Effects.

A: Newstoday (QBN) and The FWA.

A: Also a quite tough question to answer, but one project I really liked working on was Eurostar Quest back in 2006. It was when The Da Vinci Code movie was out, and everyone wanted a mystical experience online and offline for their brands. We (de-construct) did an online quest where the user had to solve 18 puzzles for a chance to win the grand prize, which was free travel with Eurostar during your entire lifetime and to stay at the Ritz in Paris for 2 nights every year for 5 years or what ever it was (Ritz is one of the most expensive hotels in Europe). It was just a fun non conventional project to work on, coming up with fun puzzles and games and finding ways to execute them. Was very well received in the end as well which was fun.

A: I hate this question! There's been so many out there during the past 5 years that has made an impact. But ok, to name a few: Get The Glass, HBO Voyeur, IKEA Dream Kitchen + lots more... what they have in common is that they tell a story.

A: A new site is in the pipeline and will be released shortly - close to our 5 year anniversary. It will be in Flash, and HTML for those who can't view flash - pretty straight forward. But without giving too much away, we are putting our work in focus a lot more in this version.

A: I don't know to be honest. In the future I'd like to start my own agency so I'll say that. But there are a lot of fantastic agencies out there, kicking out some excellent work, but for me it's more important with the culture of a company, and I don't know how it is at other agencies. But some agencies I like are Your Majesty, Group94, Hi-ReS!, b-reel, Sid Lee, Syrup, Bleed, Big Active, Dvein to name a few, all because of different reasons, may it be level of creativity, randomness, production detail, people, medium...

A: Haha, Swedish creativity... I don't think Sweden is more or less creative than any other country. I just think that we have a visual language in general that people from around the world seem to appreciate. We are simple and focused on the essence of things - in furniture design, fashion design, graphic design, architecture... always with a minimalist approach we get the job done by being honest and simple. Sometimes maybe a bit boring.

A: If you generalize; sophisticated and clean, minimal and modern. And re-inventive. We spot trends quick too.

A: Nein, ich bin zu schlecht Deutsch sprechen, aber ich verstehe es.

A: I think we have a pretty good chance of getting a good ranking, but probably not top 3 but I hope we get to the semi finals.

But what do I know, I was always the kid in school that got chosen last during the team picking process. I played classical piano and was a bit of a geek. But Zlatan will kick some euro-asses for sure.

A: Well thank you! Been a pleasure.