1) How did you first get into design?

Like so many other male designers between the ages of 25-35 today I suppose. I grew up with skateboarding, and I was really fascinated by the whole atmosphere around skateboarding. Introduced to this subculture with a strong DIY/punk attitude, you were encouraged to find your own way/style of expressing yourself. I think it was that spirit plus of course the graphics and illustrations on the decks. That’s what triggered my interest in the first place. This was in the early to mid 90’s before I started upper secondary school.

2) In 2004 you graduated from the worldly renowned School of New Media Design - Hyper Island, can you please tell us about your experience there?

The school is quite special compared to a “normal” school.They have started an international 1 year course in Stockholm now called Interactive Art Direction, and I think the management students have a separate course as well. But the core is still 2 years education (with a 7 months internship included) in Karlskrona. It’s suited in an old remand prison on a small island. So you actually share a cell with a classmate and that’s your work space. The school itself has a very nice atmosphere.

Focusing on very strong team building, all the projects are made in groups (except for your portfolio). We went away for 3 days before we started at school and made presentations, exercises to learn to know each other. By the time you got back to school you knew the name of all 68 students, and knew something about all of them. Some people you got pretty close in just 3 days.

The methods they are working by are learning-by-doing. They don’t have any traditional teachers at Hyper Island, the people working there are more there to organize everything and tie it all together. They prefer to call themselves co-workers, rather than teachers. The projects starts with a lecture (not from a co-worker but by someone from the industry). Then you get a certain task and something they want you to learn/achieve during this project but how you do it is completely up to the group. The final result isn’t necessarily the most important thing in all projects.

It’s more important what you learn during the project. You can only pass or not pass a project so it’s not grades or anything. Most of the projects are real projects from the industry and the lectures are from all over the world in the industry so you get a really good experience of working for real clients and a good network.

They won’t teach you any software or anything, that is up to the students themselves and a lot of times we arranged our own work shops after school. There’s always someone that’s better than you in Flash, Illustrator, After Effects or whatever it may be — it’s up to you to learn as much as possible from those persons.

3) Are there a lot of international designers at Hyper Island or is it mostly Swedish designers?

The school has made a lot of changes since I was studying there. At the time you had to be able to both understand and speak Swedish since most of the lectures were being held in Swedish. We had a few Norwegians and a couple of international students that could speak Swedish for some reason.

The school is now accepting international students and everything is in English. I think it’s great since the school seem to be more known outside of Sweden and they have always got a lot of applications from foreigners. I try to follow as much as I can but I’m not 100% up to date on what’s going on.

4) While you were at Hyper Island, you where part of the very well known “Crew 8″, and we all remember the fantastic work that came from you guys. Was it hard to work with so many designers on one site/project?

No not at all. I’d say the opposite. One of the best things I can say about the school is the team spirit you have there. You get to know you classmates so well after team buildings and so many intense projects together. I’ve made friends for life at Hyper Island.

We were a tight group of about 8 designers that stayed every day at school after we were done with school assignments and worked collaborative on self-commissioned projects, just to try different styles, to learn the software, pushing and helping each other. Most of the time we stayed at school all night (it’s open 24-7) and pulled an all nighter almost every other day — went straight to the lecture from our cells in the morning, then went home for some sleep around lunch time and skipped the second part of the lecture, and then got back to school after a few hours of sleep.

For the particularly Crew 8 site of course not everybody could’ve been involved (68 people would be a mess). I think Vinh Kah was the lead designer and did the tree and all illustrations and then got help from other designers. Kalle Thyselius, Adam Frankel, Nico Nuzzaci and probably a few more guys worked with the back-end, front-end and flash.

It’s funny to look back like this. I’d never even opened illustrator before I started at Hyper Island. I’m so happy I went to Hyper Island to get the time to develop and soak up all the inspiration from the creative environment there.

5) After you graduated you spent 7 months doing an internship for Buck LA, what was that like? And what did you mostly learn while you where there?

I went to Los Angeles with Mikael Selin to intern at Buck and we had two classmates interning in Beverly Hills at DNA Studios. This was after our first year at school and the internship is a part of the education. After the internship we all went back to do our final project at school.

Buck does motion graphics; neither myself nor Mikael had done any motion before. Buck was at the time a quite small team, but with large clients which led to limited time to help us into the new medium. We did some tutorials and tried our best to help as much as possible with our limited skills. But basically it was like our night sessions (we had those at Buck too) we got more time to try out new things, develop and so on. Played a lot of Soul Calibur in the conference room. And just to be living in Los Angeles for 7 months was an amazing experience. Easily the best months of my life so far. It’s a completely different thing from going somewhere on a 1 week vacation as a tourist compared to live and work there daily. I have so many good memories from the time there.

6) Do feel internships are a fundamental part in being a designer? Did it help you on the path to who you are today?

Absolutely, without all the time spent at nights, both at school and while interning, I would never learnt as much as I did. Interning is probably the easiest way to get your foot in the business when you are new and fresh. Harder if you are going abroad to USA with the problems to get a work visa and such of course, but a lot of my classmates that did their internships in Stockholm, London, Amsterdam etc got hired after the internship period was over. Also it’s very good for your CV to put a well known and respected name on there and some nice projects for your portfolio.

7) Do you prefer to work freelance or work for an agency?

I haven’t worked freelance full time except for a couple of months here in Oslo, so I don’t have that much experience of freelancing. I think both have merits and flaws. It’s nice to have that steady income every month and less stress and things to worry about and you can change ideas and get input from your co-workers.

I guess freelancing can be just as good if you share a studio space with some others to get that daily input from other designers.If you are good enough and have a lot of contacts you can choose your own projects as a freelancer, be more flexible with your time. But I guess you spend even more hours in front of the computer as a freelancer. I have my own one man company (1 UP) so I can take on smaller freelance projects on my spare time and I’m also doing a bit of djing on the weekends.

8) You recently updated your new portfolio “1 UP”; please tell us a bit about that.

Well, to start with I decided to phase out Dirty Deluxe and work under my new moniker 1 UP! I like the name 1 UP! For several reasons. It’s short, easy to remember, and since it’s my freelance moniker I thought it’d be suitable with numeral 1 since I most of the time work alone as a freelancer. I also like the obvious video game reference with a lot of association to childhood memories.

90% or more of the work I have online now have been made during my years here in Oslo so it was about time for an update. It’s also easier to get freelance work if you have an online portfolio. The freelance work I accept in my spare time, I try only to work with projects that give me enough creative freedom to try out new things and play with custom typography mixed with illustrations and graphic design. Projects that I might not do as much at work were I’m mostly working for bigger and more corporate clients. It’s nice to get a mix of both worlds.

Most of all I’d like to combine my interests for music and graphic design. It would be the dream for me to develop a series of work for a band over time. Or to be an in-house art director/designer for a whole label, like Non-Format have been for Lo Recoding & LoAF. Saville have done it for New Order, Joy Division and Pulp. Farrow for Pet Shop Boys. Julian House for Primal Scream, Broadcast and Stereolab. Big Active are doing the same for a bunch of bands.

9) Scandinavian design is recognized world wide mostly for its minimal design. What makes Swedish design so special to you?

I think this it’s mostly for industrial design rather than graphic design. With internet I think the graphic design scene, these days are quite global. I prefer the bold and colorful expression from Finland over the more minimalistic Swedish design you mentioned. And for industrial design the Danes are easily the best. No doubt, so Swedish design isn’t that special to me. Sorry Ingvar.

10) What would you say are your favorite design trends?

I don’t know if I have any favorite trends, but I see more and more geometric shapes now, which I’ve always been very fond of. Especially when playing with custom typography.

11) Who are your favorite designers?

Except for those I mentioned earlier, I really like the conceptual (often with a slogan or punch line) and stripped down illustrations that Geoff McFetridge does. I like Parra for the same reason. I love Michel Gondrys visual language in everything he does. I like Lou Dorfsman work for CBS, Otl Aicher, Herb Lubalin, Saul Bass, Massimo Vignelli. Mat Maitland (Big Active), Trevor Jackson, Hort, Arne Jacobsen. He’s not a designer but I like most of the stuff the director Darren Aronofsky does as well. Pi is probably my favorite movie. Requiem For A Dream is almost as good.

12) What music do you mostly listen to when you work?

I don’t really have one kind of “work-music” I prefer. Lately though, I’ve been listening to new albums by TV On The Radio, M83, Air France, Glasvegas (all of them are very good).Check out my last.fm instead?

13) As well as illustration you also design typefaces, how do you normally start work on a typeface? What is your process?

The progress is different every time and most of the time I just start to play around in Illustrator like I did for The Legends and see what comes out of it. Sometimes I start with a font like I did for Margaret Bergers album and try to make it more interesting, edgy and visual. Another time I might just like how a letter looks like and try to do more in the same style.

14) At the moment you are currently based in Norway, is there a huge difference between Norwegian design and Swedish design?

I don’t think so. I think it used to be a bigger difference before but I feel like Oslo/Norway have really stepped up the last couple of years and there are popping up new, smaller studios all the time which is very refreshing. Thank you so much Joakim your contribution! It was a pleasure having you!