I am terribly sorry that I couldn’t post earlier. Some very exciting weeks have gone by at Hyper Island, with many cool projects, late worknights, and lots of fun.
The Muffins have worked really hard on the module Advanced Interface design, which results will be displayed in this post, I’ve created my portfolio during the Christmas break and I’ve started my second semester with a great new team with who I’ll will be working on a new identity for the Swedish Armed Forces.

The last module before the Christmas break was called Advances Interface Design. Daniel Ilic from North Kingdom was our module leader and introduced us into online campaign sites, games experiences, and the need of good social branding. The brief we got asked us to choose between to clients: Millenium Promise or Le Laboureur. Millenium Promise was a charity organization that wanted poverty out of the world by 2025. And Le Laboureur was a French clothing brand. Both companies needed more awareness and that was exactly what we had to create.
We had 7 weeks time to come up with a solution. My team, a.k.a. the Muffins, chose Millenium Promise as a client. Not an easy one, cause so many companies have tried to come up with a good campaign for a charity organization. Most of them failed, some of them succeeded (as we learned through our research). Coming up with a new a better solution wasn’t an easy task.
Finding the concept went really slow. We generated a lot of ideas, but coming up with a final concept took us a while. Patrick Gardner, CEO of Perfect Fools was our coach, and made sure we were still heading the right way.

It took us 6 weeks to find, perfect and finalize our concept, and this was the result: we came up with the idea of a small creature one could raise. This small creature lived in your smartphone, and you would raise it by playing with it, giving it food, petting it. The game would last no more then 3 or 4 days. We called the creature and Odd. And for every Odd you wanted to raise, you had to pay a small amount of money that would go to Millenium Promise. Being able to do this made one raise and Odd where, at the same time, one would raise the odds of someone living in poverty. After the 3 days, the Odd would get born, and go out into the real world. The last memory you’d have, was a picture you could take with your smartphone from you and your Odd. You would keep in touch only by an occasional mail the Odd would send you, informing you on what mission Millenium Promose was working on.

We were really proud of the concept, and started working hard on the prototypes. In no more then 1.5 week, we developed an application simulator, a small website and a presentation. We were ready for the presentation, but not really for the feedback.
Although the feedback was good, we felt a bit down. Daniel was happy with the work we had done, but didn’t see how this campaign would spread. And to be honest, we didn’t had a good solution for this. In addition to that, he told us we were narrowing down our target audience a lot by making an application for smartphones, which was obviously true as well. But we had some great feeback as well, both from the class mates and Daniel, for which we are very grateful.

And than it was Christmas break, time to head home and have some time with the loved ones. The break meant also time to develop your portfolio and prepare for the internships. I went through many designs, and even started one developing. But I ended up with this website. I’m still applying for some companies, and haven’t got a certain internship yet, but I’m getting there.
Another thing we made during the Christmas break, was The Idea Swap. A small website that was meant to be a teaser for the bigger promotion website that’s coming up. The concept behind it, was that people could write down an idea and swap it for a new one. The website had a tremendous success. Today, we’ve had over 41 000 visitors, more then 1000 daily, which is something I never expected.

We now started our second semester with a new module and thus a new team. The module is called Brand Identity. Simon Mogren from DDB Stockholm is our module leader and asked us to come up with a new identity for the Swedish Armed Forces and all its subdivisions. The cool part were the groups, cause this time we had to make the groups ourselves. We did this by writing down what kind of role we’d like to have in a group, and our skills. This paper we would present to the entire class, one by one. And than it was mingle time. We started to talk with one another, find the right people. And by all coincidences, I ended up in a group consisting of 5 girls and me. We’re called Cas & The Cats, and we have lot of fun. We play a lot of charades, play drinking games (without any alcohol involvement!), we dress up differently every day, and have a photoshoot with fantastic results. Just to give you an idea:

And although it doesn’t look like we’re doing much we work, we are working hard and efficiently. This Thursday we have to present our work to the client, so it’s an exciting week that’s coming up.

That’s it for now, stay tuned for the result of this module really soon.