Sketching in Porto Old Town/Castle Area, Portugal

This is a sketch from a vacation in Portugal. When you are backpacking with two other designers, how can you avoid to have a sketch session in the beautiful Old town/castle area in Porto, Portugal's 2nd largest city?

Drawing Game - After Work Activity

Last week me and a colleague got the task to prepare some fun games and activities for the Summer Party after work that we had at the office. One of the things we did was this game, which we called "Digital Rumors". It meant that we prepared a Wacom Cintiq screen and a Photoshop document with different white layers. Then we choose a picture that the first participant should look at for 10 seconds before he or she unhides the first white layer and starts drawing the picture again from memory. Then the next person looks 10 seconds at the previous person's sketch, before he or she unhides the next white layers and tries to draw the previous image from memory. This means that the image very quickly gets distorted and in our case the "animal" even changes kind multiple times and at one point even changes direction. The activity turned out to be very successful and appreciated, but I think we had a bit too high expectations on our participants when choosing picture...

To see the result of the game, check out the GIF below. The pictures are presented last drawing first and the original last:

IHL - Inuse [Table] Hockey League

We have a table hockey game at the office and having a 5 min game, or sometimes two, is a good way to reset the energy and the focus in the afternoon when productivity starts to go down. Now and then me and some colleagues arrange small tournaments or afterworks, or even join bigger competitions like the international table hockey competition Swedish Masters. I decided to design a logo/picture for these internal events. IHL means Inuse Hockey Leauge, Inuse (part of ÅF) being the user experience design company that I work for. The image is a montage of 3 images that I found on Google: One of table hockey players, one of a real Finnish hockey goalie and one with a goalie looking straight into the camera. Then I played around a bit, making the image look more painted, by smudging out the edges. I think the result became really nice and it actually turned out to be a good Photoshop exercise.

Future Container Handler Concept Sketches

Here are some sketches from a project that I do when I have time between assignments at work. However, lately I have not had much time to work on it, because since we (ÅF Design) moved together with the UX/Service design company Inuse in the beginning of this year there is always something to fix in the office, like unpacking, setting up the workshop, putting together reference cases for our shared work in progress online project portfolio a.s.o. However, when everything is done I believe we at Inuse will be one of the strongest players within the design world in Sweden and be able to cover almost all major areas of design because of our good mix of competences.

Model Making Course - Computer Mouse

Recently I found some PU (Polyurethane) foam models from my time at the BA Programme in Industrial Design, Umeå Institute of Design. This was one of our first courses where we learned to use the school's amazing workshop and in this particular part of the course the objective was to learn how to work with PU foam and also to get a taste of how it can be to sketch in 3D. First I did some sketch models made from one of the softer versions of PU foam and then I choose my favorite and made a final version in a harder foam, which I also painted to more or less resemble what the final look could be.

Toilet Art - Tesla in Space

In the main toilet of the designstudio we have created a culture where people paint and write things on the walls, which is quite nice and can give you an extra smile during the day when you see something new up there. The other day I saw that someone had added a rocket booster to a house made by someone else, so since Elon Musk launched his Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying his private car into space not too long ago, I couldn't resist adding a Tesla on the top of the "rocket-house".

Equipment: Thick White Ink Pen

Time: 5 min

Me on the Inside

This is a sketch to illustrate my personality when it comes to food. I might not look like this in reality, but underneath the surface it's not too far off. I sketched it on a post-it patch and originally put it on a colleague's empty food box together with another post-it saying "Thx!" after she asked me if I wanted to eat it, since she had forgotten it in the work fridge. But then I kind of fell in love with this overweight version of me and now I keep him taped to my desktop lamp at my workplace.

Equipment: Blue Ballpoint pen, a Black felt pen and a post-it patch

Time: 10 min

Mclaren F1 Livery concept

Here is my suggestion for how I think the 2018 Mclaren F1 livery could be much improved with very small changes:

The orange livery has great potential and looks great already in some angles, but the design is inhibited by mainly one design flaw, in my oppinion: The blue should only be an accent color and I think it has been overdone in the present design. The similar Indy 500 livery on the other hand (see below) was excellent because of its super clean approach and really stood out from the rest of the field. As you can see the blue in that case was kept only to parts of the wings and the numbers while the orange was allowed to really dominate the main body, including the fin, which I think is the way to go with the F1 livery as well. With more, preferably black, graphical elements on the car it will look even better, for examples when there are more logos added to the car. Making the fin entirely orange would also makes the car look more aggressive because the appearance of the main body becomes more edgy and less round. My oppinion is that the combination of the round shape and the big blue and orange fields makes the present design almost look a bit childish. To further improve the livery the black parts could be made matte instead of glossy and possibly the halo could be orange, or partly orange. 

2017 Indy 500 Livery

Water Cooker Ballpoint Pen Sketch

Practicing my product design sketch skills during a church meeting. I've always said I listen better when I have something to keep my hands busy with, and that's why my math notebooks always had plenty of sketches along the sides in school, but at the same time I must admit it's a fine line to getting too much into the sketch when you find some interesting shapes or a nice looking sketch. After the church meeting a 70+ year old "sister" and friend saw my sketch and commented "Oh, that looks so much fun!". Sometimes age really doesn't matter very much.

Equipment: Blue Ballpoint Pen

Time: 20 min

New F1 logo design concepts

I'm a big fan of Formula 1 and my opinion is that the new F1 logo (The second logo below) is really, really bad, so I made some concepts on how to improve the design. The main problem is that the new logo says "FI" and not "F1" and I also think it lacks overall character.