Had a few minutes over to finish my short presentation on education reform, I hope you like it. Feel free to ask about anything you feel I’m neglecting to mention, should extrapolate on or if you think I’m just plain wrong.
Another business card design, this one with a slightly less hidden fetish for the mint/new spring green that I really like. For some reason this color represents the color of sunshine and happiness for me. Has something to do with new leaves on birch trees in spring but that’s as far back as I care to identify the emotional response.
Minimalist color bombardment
The card had, besides the clear fetish for green, a slogan about design that I regularly use as a mantra and a short pitch about why I can help improve your product. Not the most convincing one I’ve written but still alright. The typography of the pitch is a bit dodgy as the wording wouldn’t let me balance the characters by reshaping the sentences. Might return to this one.
I realized last weekend that I’m missing a proper business card. Time to design one.
And since I’m at home, sick but not dying, I took the time to do a couple of sketches.
Minimalist Typographic Business Card
This card is based on the very popular typographic design posters you’ll find floating around the web. Complete with a more minimalist front with the logo from my current WP theme design (not launched, still sketching and tweaking)
These are just sketches for my WP theme. Just getting ideas out to test them visually. Experimenting with design is really an awesome process and I wish we had the tools to do the same with interaction without involving a group of developers and spending a lot of money.
Portfolio showcase design
Experimented a lot with gradients and feedback as if the objects had a real world existence.
Worked pretty well but not at all to the degree I was looking for. Getting users to experience fake tactile experience through Gestalt Closure is really hard without sound.
Blog with portfolio images
Here I tried relying more on the grid to make the site look structured and clean. But I bailed out in the last minute and added a few details outside the grid that didn’t work at all.
lifestream design
Here I was just trying to present a lifestream that could work as a living resume of my entire life. Before long I realized that what I really was designing was an XML feed. Not at all what I had set out to do.
Interactive businesscard
Testing out the idea of a virtual business card. But it started feeling cheap really early. The point of a business card is to be able to hand it around. A website doesn’t have the same appeal for the function. If I wanted you to find out exactly who I am I’d probably hand you my resume, not my site.
Lifestream with a presentation of me
This was one of the most interesting models I tried. Another fake spatial space website but with equal amounts of information about me and information that I wanted visitors to see. Worked pretty well but ended up a bit cramped. Not far from my current direction though.
I redid jesperbylund.com, finally hosting it myself.
It includes my portfolio and blog and was designed to be an interactive information sheet about me and my work.
Since all design is iterative I can't be sure this first version will work as intended. Only testing will tell. But since it's based on cognitive processes it should be an interesting website to most visitors.
Tele2.se was relaunched with a new design in Febuary of 09. The new design was created by Cordovan Digital and implemented into the CMS Reddot by myself, Jakob Neander and Tobias Lindman.
The black top was a redesign of the Business part of the site in the summer of 09. Designed once again by Cordovan Digital.
This was my third year project at the University of Skovde. Together with a team of 18 third and fourth year students we designed and implemented everything from the engine up. We had planned a 8 player cooperative shooter with online ranking.
The game was bought by the University and was intended to be used for PR purposes at LAN parties.
Sadly, the engine development was delayed due to changing demands from the University and in the end lighting and core gameplay progression was never fully implemented.
The game was however a great success as in it's final stages it did support online ranking and up to 8 players cooperating over LAN. The University even hosted a compitition in which new students downloaded the games and ranked for most kills during a week. A price was awarded and over 200 students did compete.
Dreamlords the Reawakening was the follow up on the critical success Dreamlords. Dreamlords never had monetary success and to reboot the brand and still retain the community Lockpick Entertainment created Dreamlords the Reawakening which was something of a cross between a sequel and an extension.
The lore was the same but the game play was not.
Dreamlords the Reawakening was picked up by several publishers and published in three territories. It was commercially successful for about a year before the economic crisis hit us and bankrupted the company.
Dreamlords the Reawakening is still being developed by active community members and former devs.
Dreamlords was the brain child of a group of student from the university of shoved. It was a unique mix of RTS gaming and web based long term strategy.
The game was released to critical success but we never broke even. Dreamlords also lost a number of developers as the profitability shrank at the same time as interest from other game developers grew.
Grim Breed was my second year project at the University of Skovde. It was a RTS game designed to be simplistic but offer a unique UI that let players issue complex orders to troops with ease.
The game was severely hampered by an external pathfinding library that we found out to late was not up to the challenge of guiding such a large number of units. The game was a great success for the members of the team and is to this date one of the most successful game projects to come out of UoS.
I'm just a really tall guy who happens to love to understand what people do and why.
I fell in love with what engages people early on and decided digital entertainment and products were the way of the future.
I work smart, not hard, to find the details that matter. And I love to see people feel my work without really percieving it.
IF you need this knowledge or the effects of it, I'd be happy to share it with you. Follow or contact me:
I design for interaction. No matter what the product or service.
And I make that interaction fun. Interaction and fun are closely connected, it's harder to create fun without interaction, most people just don't know why.
Ease of use and simplicity is a side effect of designing for interaction, and all my work echo this effect.
Download my CV