IKEA goes art museum

I went to see an exhibit about IKEA at Liljevalchs (a major art gallery in Stockholm) the other day. The interesting thing about IKEA is that IKEA manages to bundle up all the things that are great about Sweden in one blue and yellow box that spreads cultural values in much more powerful ways than any cultural institute or politician or royal family could ever do…

So what is Sweden then according to IKEA blue and yellow box? Sweden is financial responsibility, democratic values, children´s rights, gay rights, “beauty to the people”, Sweden is common sense and childlike spirit, being mindful about natural resources… List goes on and I think it´s pretty amazing that these things can be expressed through something as simple as a couch with a changeable cover (embedded idea that children have the right to be free and messy and the home should be set up accordingly).

IKEA logos from back in the day

IKEA campaign around the time of Obama´s election. Under the slogan “Change begins at home” IKEA set up an Oval Office furnished with IKEA furniture at Union Station in DC, complete with the IKEA flag next to the American flag . I like !

IKEA and gay pride

My favorite item at the exhibit, so beautiful!

Spacespace

I met with design firm Sandberg&Timonen the other day and was super inspired by their elegant, subtle, spacious designs. I´d say this is Scandinavian design at its best with lots of room to breathe, to think, to imagine new worlds… Gorgeous !!

Pulling faces and Stockholm proportions

I also checked out the final exhibit at Berghs School of Communication (design school craze is almost over now ) and would like to share my two favorite projects.

The first project is a communication campaign for an IT consultant firm. The campaign aims at questioning the pricing of the industry and making the point that this particular IT consultant firm doesn’t charge a higher rate than what the market deems appropriate. So, the whole idea is to have an online auction where the consultant is the auction item. The picture below is from the banner campaign leading to the campaign site – it displays the face of one of the consultants and shows how you can drag and pull the poor dude’s face with your mouse as if he was any product on sale. Interesting and funny idea that would probably only work in a country with strong trade unions and high minimum wages and worker’s rights. Come to think about it, it would probably only work with male auction items too. Oh well, I love the pulling and dragging the dude’s face either way .

Second project is a Graphic Design-project expressing the city of Stockholm through a typeface named Stockholm Sans. The design student told me he researched old street signs from the “folkhemmet”-era (the building of the Swedish welfare state in the 50s) that all expressed a modernist kind of standardization. He also incorporated the proportions and shapes of landmark buildings in Stockholm, and allowed some “flaws” to symbolize the modernist folkhemmet-approach that maybe didn’t always live up to its own expectations. Pretty clever .

Bright Information

I came across this incredibly beautiful information design-poster at Forsberg´s graduate exhibit (another design school in Stockholm) last week. It displays mass-emails sent out to different department at the school – the brightly colored bars to the left identifying the different departments and the lines of text to the right displaying e-mail content categories and subject lines. The information aspect has some flaws (like it takes a little while to figure out what´s what and how it all goes together) but I thought this poster deserved to be included in my blog as a beautiful attempt at expressing complex information visually .

Kolla!

So there´s a whole bunch of design-related exhibits going on in Stockholm right now and I will share some more highlights on this blog . First up are my two favorite pictures from the exhibit Kolla! which displays the best of Graphic Design and Illustration in Sweden right now. The exhibit as a whole was very Swedish (obviously ) – Graphic Design is slick and clean and most illustrations are kind of quick and bit loose. Very nice most of it but I still see a lack of some braveness as far as breaking with already established (yet nice) guidelines of how to do things…

My favorite Graphic Design-piece is this poster made by Happy F&B in Gothenburg. It´s for a museum about skateboarding and I like the serenity of it. It´s brave to make a poster about somethings so action and adrenaline-filled so calm and open, allowing the viewer to rest in the possibility of action .

The illustration I chose is made by Annelie Carlström and struck me with its beautiful lines more than anything else… I´m not so sure I like the  look on her face but almost every single illustration depicting a person in this exhibit had this distanced “excuse me???”- face . Beautiful beautiful drawing either way, absolutely love the hair too.

Swedish Buddha

I came across this super slick and glowing Buddha symbol when meeting with Anders Malmstromer at Graphic Design studio AMGD in Stockholm. I learnt that Anders spends his time between Sweden and China and that this Buddha symbol was a self-promotional design and meant to be a Swedish interpretation of the classic Chinese Buddha symbol. Meditation for the people .

Bajs

At the Beckmans show (see previous entry) I also encountered the word “bajs” more than once. Bajs means “poo” in Swedish, is pronounced “buys” and I would dare to say it´s one of the most popular words in the Swedish subconscious. This thought of mine is supported by a survey stating that bajs is the most commonly used password in Sweden, closely followed by bajsbajs and kissbajs (“peepoo”).

Bajs 1. Beautifully illustrated children´s book where you can even “scratch and smell” the bajs.

Bajs 2. Written on a piece of paper where visitors were encouraged to write down ideas for others to steal (as a statement in favor of looser copyright laws and free information flow).

I´m not sure if it´s the the way the word bajs rolls so nicely in a Swedish mouth or if the appeal of this word has roots in Swedish general childhood ideals where bajsing is celebrated as a massive achievement in the growing child´s life . We´ve even turned the English word “shit” into a positive expression of excitement (shitgood, shitgreat, shitnice)! Bajsnice .