It’s hard to be a client these days. A few years ago you could be quite sure that what you bought was a unique idea from the designer, today it can be something bought, a generic stock design masked by the designer to be something unique.

The good side of the stock image is that it saves a lot of time and money for both a designer and the client when used right. If you use stock imagery as a small parts or building blocks for your larger design projects it’s brilliant. I mean, if you need images of paper, post it notes, wood, pins, grass or something that needs to be presented as close to its natural looks as possible it is ridiculus to hire a photographer for the shots when you can get them for a few dollars instantly.

But still, as a buyer of design you need to beware of the authenticity of the designs you buy.

I attended the Cap&Design event today about why Sweden is doing worldclass work for the web. Sweden is producing stunning work for the web. Agencys like North Kingdom, Farfar and more are leaders in the business. But some thing has changed. In 2000 Sweden was leading almost everything that had anything to do with the web. Today we are outrun in every area except consumer communication. The UK is better then us in design and the US is far ahead of us in development.

So what happened?
Why are we outrun?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that failure is by default bad in the swedish culture. If you fail you are a failure. Period. And you will be a failure for a longtime. If a swede fail we shy away hoping that noone do remember where others draw wisdom from the experience and advances.

I think that has ruined the personal risktaking. It has made creators and developers think twice before launching a startup or diving head first into an idea that they believe in.

So instead of continue the trial and error mentality of the 2000 era we have focused our creativity on presentation instead of innovation. We use existing technologies to dress existing problems in new solutions instead of creating new technologies for new needs.

Right now it’s not more than two weeks until the building and decoration of the new office will start so it’s about time to present The idea.

Friends waiting for the new office.

Mostly when setting up an office you tend to build it in a strict hierarchic way; everything centers around your current work/desk, orbiting around that is the stuff you need to get your current work done. At the outskirts of the office is the rest of the stuff; books, inspirational material, music, colladorative spaces and hopefully some decorative details.

But why do you put the current work in the center? why do you let one place be the center of the office?

A lot of agencys I have visited is full of dead spaces. They are flawless designed and filled with Aarnio, Eames, Jacobsen, Miller and more. But the spaces feels like show-off areas for visitors than having a purpose/advantage for the people working at the agency. The result is that the spaces feels totally dead. Beautiful, expensive, modern but totally dead. You don’t feel at home in those spaces, you don’t feel welcome there. You are intruding the facade of the agency.

The idea with our new office is to build 3-4 different spaces that serves 3-4 different purposes, and then complete those with one not so centered workplace.

The result that I want is spaces that is in contrast to each other so that if you need to get out of your box and restart with new ideas the spaces will help you change direction of thought. They will take you away from the inboxes, to-do-lists, code-views and milestones.

To be continued with Part III “The Plan”

This is part two in my series of posts about the new Nofont office. You can find Part I, “The Office part I”, here.

So many projects and ideas is lying on the harddrive about to wake up and come alive. The time is now really divided between clients and self fund projects. And I truly love it.

First up is a project that I’ve been running with Jaan Orvet over at Sharpenr.net. The project will hopefully be big but whatever happends it will be fantastic. It has forced me, and I guess Jaan to, to review almost every view and value we have on running our own businesses. The project will be released later and I’m really looking forward to it.

An alternative take on typography.

Second coming is my passion above all; typography. The earlier versions of Nofont.com had a clerer focus on typography but it was always just for fun, just something I did on the weekends and the evenings. Earlier I failed to bring it to the level that it really deserved. The third edition of the site really took of, lots of press coverage, lots of feedback and tons of visitors, but I failed to maintain it. Today I regret that hugely, I brings tears to my eyes that I neglected it … but there was so much other things that I preferred to do instead, I met my future wife Malin, we got two kids (and now a third coming), we started the kids store and the clothing lable. So it would not have time to keep Nofont going and to be honest I don’t think that I would have come to this point with the business if it hadn’t been for the above things.

This time thypography are on a totally different scale, the typography of the 4th edition of Nofont will be the best ever. I have found that feeling I had almost 10 years ago, everything feels fresh, everything has a value and every part of the business has it’s clear purpose.

The biggest difference is that today tools for everything you want to do is in reach. 10 years ago everything had huge prize or had to be self developed; payment solutions, forums, book publishing, distribution of merchandise, decent hosting, CMS and more.

Back to the future. The “Typography” section will contain;

• Typography - tips and trix for the daily production/typography.
• Alternative typography - experiments with typography, letterforms and communication. Those was the backbone of the third edition and will be reborn this fall. There will be new ideas and experiments. The old ones will be published as a book.
• Charachters - for quite sometime I have been collecting letters from old signs, 3 dimentional physical steel letters. They will be put on display and available for sale (and a lot of them are already sold).
• Scripts/tools - I wouldn’t call them plugins or apps but they are small scripts made for, firstly, InDesign and they take care of the daily repeated monotone typographic work you have to do when you are working with books and magasines. The scripts will be on sale and downloadable from the site.

Last (and maybe least) up of the coming things is the portfolio. Generally I’m not that fond of portfolios. Simply cos they are not reflecting the truth about you as a designer, they are often polished up and commercial stuff might be mixed up with non commercial or promotional projects. Ideas that origins from someone else is mixed up with ideas that the designer never have been able to sell. So to reflect a designers daily delivery I don’t trust portfolios at all. Used in a way of saying what the designer likes to work with, fine, I can buy that.

For the last five years I have only taken jobs on recommendation, mostly cos I have worked with a lot of people and the network has grown out of that. But also cos I get a natural filter, the first selection is made by people that know me and I have a personal connection to/worked with earlier. They know if a project fits me or not and they make the first selection unconsciously to my advance.

Now that I focus more and more on nofont.com I won’t have that personal connection with everyone that comes by so I must put the portfolio out there. I’m not that happy about it but as a antithesis I have published the Annual Design Reports so that people can se everything I have ever done and form their opinions from there.

So Nofont of 2008 has a lot of passion coming. Keep it up Andreas, you are doing good!

As a freelancer your best partners are other freelancers. Why? Simply cos they do whats best for you as a group and not what’s best for themselves.

If you have seen the movie A beautiful mind you know the nobel prize winning theory of governing dynamics by John Nash. Those apply to the team of freelancers.

In a group of people representing larger companies there will be hidden agendas that often risks or limits the overall outcome of the project.

Those people always represent other interests then the teams. If they cut the biggest part of the deal, snitches the majority of the development or management time it makes them look good in the large organisation backing them. Even if it’s negative for the team it will be positive for their own carrers. And the negative results of the team can always be blamed on the other team members. After the project is finished they can fall back on a salesforce in an organisation that falsely thinks of them as great team member.

As a freelancer the other team members is the people you will do your future sales with. They are the ones the will set you up in their future projects. If you fail them you have nothing to fall back on. So in a team of freelancers you and your fellow freelancers automatically do whats best for the group and the project and that is something your clients benefit from.