Archive for the 'Blog' Category

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My feedreader makes me think I live in the future

Ever since I saw Back to the Future part 2 as a kid I’ve wanted to live in the future.
And I think i speak for all of us when i say that a pink hover-board made by Mattel is a must buy on the release day in the not so distant future.
I’d say the society we live in are all struggling towards a future and a whole lot of futrure-thingies have come to exist in the public market during the last two decades.

The most important one of these are of course the feeds and the feed reader.
Ugly orange screens with white letters, slowly scrolling upwards in public spaces, displaying news and propaganda are an essential item of the technoir dystopian cyberpunk future.
The basic text feeds are the last secure mass communication lines in Transmetropolitan.
In the far future mental logs from exploring spaceships are displayed as feeds on the civilized planets, millions of light-years away.
Text is basic; text takes almost no storage space.

Yes, this is a bit more nerdy then my unusual entries.
And now what I wanted to say all along: my shared objects from google reader
This is what I like recently and might be fun for someone else to see. And the important thing to do is to share the one you think are interesting, on and on in an endless loop. Entries are now free from their websites and their creators.

Somehow it’s just like piracy, but legal.

Mimicking work

We are in the first week of The Industry Project, our weary last module before summer-holidays and internship. It’s quite good; we act as three separate agencies with real life clients and make believe budgets. I got appointed the CEO position of my agency and have spent the last days counting man-hours, costs and profit. Right now we’re getting into routines and have assigned smaller groups to each client. I’d like to say we are on top of it, but this being Hyper Island I’m sure we’ll get hit by the storm quite soon. Actually looking forward to it.

Back from things and stuff

Amsterdam is over and I’m back in Duckburg once again. It took me about 20 minutes to get restless and wanting to head over to Häktet for some regular Hyper Islanding.

Anyway.

It was great to be away.

I remembered what life actually used to be like before… Before what? before 2006 I’d say… before I started my the worst few of my really worthless jobs. I’m never gonna have a worthless job again. That is probably the key thing for me going to Hyper at all.

 

Epitaph said that they want to do something with the strategy we gave them, and that feels so good. Firstly as a confirmation that we did do the right thing, put our focus the right way and actually pulled off all that work in a swedish-summer-weathery town full of bars, clubs, drugs and hookers. Secondly because I actually didn’t think that they would dare to do anything with it.

 

So now all that’s left is to find an agency internship, in Stockholm or Amsterdam, and just keep the good spirit up for little more than a month and then I’m off for a real job in a real world (well, it’ll start as a real internship but… you know..).

Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives

In our task to shake the foundations of the music industry my research let me to illegally download a record by a band named as stated above. Honest Bob are somewhat famed by having songs son Guitar Hero I & II, but nothing gave away how they actually sound and behave in album form.
First of all, I have a hidden side that loves silly-but-witty lyrics from artist like Tom Lehrer, Doktor Kosmos and of course Bellman. Honest Bob delivers all this with lyrics about the time cube, Chomsky’s language theories and occasional references to aliens and Swedish artists.
The sound is a easy listen kind of lounge rock, speaking to my fascination of artist like Mike Flowers and Hugo Montenegro (not that I listen to them, but none the less they fascinate me).
But still they might be crap, it’s too early to say.
Did i mention they made a heal like a hole cover?

In other news Skynet is coming. Read all about it on Wierd.

New Laser Ideas

Something is happening to my creativity; since spring came to town about a week ago I can’t stop to think of new projects and new things for existing projects. I’ve written an article for our old closed down role-playing site Boningen, story outlined the second series of The Hitman Comic, dreamt together a few videogame concepts and storyline ideas for various media, decided to look into computer software for handicapped and other alternative ways of communicating with digital devices and finally mapped out a revamp series for a superhero team I liked as a kid: Cloak & Dagger.

And this is only the things that don’t concerns the Epitaph project…

Music, Branding, Magic(k)

So for the last week or whenever we been researching music, online stuff and our target groups attitude towards the same and this is what I’ve gathered so far:

 

Internet is more important factor then friends for finding new music.

 

More people claim to buy CD’s than to download music (but the difference is so small it can be disregarded)

 

Millencollin sounds a tiny bit more punkish in concert then they do on record.

 

And that’s it.

I’ve been reading a lot of advertisement books lately (“the branding gap” and “hey whipple, squeeze this!” are two I can recommend) and the theories about brand value, good communication and cause/effect are similar to the theories about magic(k) that the  authors I read fiction of (not Bret Easton Ellis included since he is a odd person in completely different ways) all seem to believe in (Grant Morrison, RAW and so on). The Idea that man and words shape reality, and that men who control words (and other arts) shape realty. The authors seem to think that we, the ad people, aren’t aware of this power. Id’ rather say that we are fully aware.

Men in this context refer to the human race, not gender.

Quit harassing me already!

Damsterwham!

Day three in Amsterdam is almost over, me and Tove are home, quietly interneting the night away while the Johanna’s stayed out until later exploring Dutch nighttime even more then we did before 02:30…

The town is great and Kong are a nice bunch. Epitaph was also nice ppl.  We have met up with a few of IAD08 and apparently left their regular after work bar without paying. On the other hand we bought bicycles for all our money, so some free drinks are only fair, considering all that karma.

Tomorrow we’re going for more free stuff; hopefully since whatever that big ad-school is named (ANT?) opens their Amsterdamish facility. Considering my fortune-chocolate everything should go well.

And: Kids, remember to never blog intoxicated.

TPLC IS OVER.

The Project Lifecycle ended in flames, terror and all the other things that show how close to disaster you’ve been walking.

If you only look to results, however it was a success. The Grönsaker Dirket farmers loved our stuff and so on while Ottoboni and Vin & Sprit was curious and wanted to know more, but not all out declaring us heroes of the biz.

But back to the bad stuff:

I don’t think I’ve been so out of control about anything else before in my life and so clueless about how to solve it.

I seriously hope that all of the internal chaos and discomfort is not my fault cause then I don’t know how to handle the Industry Project module in a month.

Until then I’m off to Amsterdam to do some kind of work with Epitaph, the record company that once upon a time had cool bands like Agnostic Front and New Bomb Turks but now are left with Millencollin and that whole thing. It will be great!

The Project Lifecycle

So, Friday was a deadline in our current module, the project lifecycle, where I act as Project Manager for two of the groups. The difference on our projects makes it hard to sum up what the module was about. One of my groups made a complete redesign of a local business, the other have been creating what is meant to be a strategy for Vin & Sprits digital magazine.

Let’s see how it works out on the client presentations. 

T-P-L-C, is that what you are to me?

Since I’m having this blog on both this url and Jochmetropolitan updating takes me about two minutes longer than it used to, that is bothersome. In the future I’ll try to shut down the other and only update the newlaseridea blog. However since almost no one reads neither right now I don’t expect a riot at my house for doing so.

We have just started up the new module The Project Lifecycle and I’m Project Manager for two of the groups, we have real authentic live clients paying us nothing but IF they like what we do they pay the school a small symbolic fee. So, that’s realism down the drain if you ask me.

On the other hand not to be so grumpy (I had enough of that during the Creatives Unlimited development)the contact with real clients with real client feedback is probably a great experience, more on that after lunch when one of my groups actually meet the client for the first time. It’s a redesign of a website that we try to turn into a whole graphic profile. Lets see how that plays out…