25/05/2011 - D&AD PRESIDENT’S LECTURE – LONDON MAY 2011

On Thursday 12th May, a few of us here at Higher Ground Creative made a small venture, north of the river, to the Institute of Education near Russell Square to attend one of the D&AD Lectures. These lectures exist to inspire, stimulate discussion & fuel debate, with speakers at the ‘president’s lectures’ representing the very best in their fields. Past speakers have included the likes of the internationally renowned Neville Brody through to guests such as ‘fashion guru’, Wayne Hemingway.

When we heard about this months guest, Robert Lindström (designer & founder of North Kingdom) we rushed straight to our diaries to clear a date and book our seats.

For those that don’t know, North Kingdom are a D&AD black pencil winning agency based way up in the far northern reaches of Sweden, in a little town called Skellefteå. They’ve been working with clients such as Vodaphone, Adidas & Cadburys on a whole host of creative platforms since their inception back in 2003. On a personal level, founder Robert Lindström has been a big inspiration and influence for a couple of our designers here at HGC, with Jay & Mark being avid followers of his personal blog (Design Chapel) since 2001.


http://www.designchapel.com/dchpl2002/

http://designchapel.com/blog/

Both Robert and his senior producer Marcus Ivarsson were present to take the lecture, talking everyone through how they operate as an agency. They hand picked some of their favourite projects to explain in detail how they were concepted and created, touching on some of the processes and procedures behind each brief, how they coordinate resources (from all over the world) and how they ensure everyone is operating as ‘one brain’. For any agency or designer it’s always a pleasure to hear about how other businesses are setup, and seeing how good ideas come to life!

Of particular interest were the workings produced for New York based marketing agency Y&R, for client ‘LG’.

Robert and his team concepted and created an animated creature called ‘Gil’ (‘Life is good’ backwards – which is LG’s strap line), that would be housed within a huge interactive billboard placed in Times Square, that was fed on good news. You can view the results here;

Behind the Scenes: LG Good News Billboard Times Square from North Kingdom on Vimeo.

On top of this, we very much liked the ‘Fuck’ rule!

Functionality
Usability
Cosmetics
Kärlek (‘Love’ in Swedish)

An approach that many agencies should be aware of. A carefully managed combination of good design & functionality is key!

As always, it was great to see so many people from the design community coming together for presentations and discussions such as this, and our hats go off to Robert & Marcus for what was a fantastic insight in to their projects, thought processes and core values.

Until next time, ciao for now fellow followers!

HGC.