Välkommen! I’m John, a graphic designer living and working in Stockholm, Sweden.
For the past three years I’ve been working at Essen International, with clients such as
Skandia and
PTS.
Some of my other works include the book and website for furniture design project
The Kinship Method, the creative coding community Sunday Sites, a magazine for digital
natives by the name of Tangents, the title design and poster for an award winning short film & AFU – a poetic archive over UFO sightings. I also like to make fonts in my spare time.
Skandia
During my time at Essen, Skandia was one of my most frequent clients. Skandia was founded in 1855 and is one of Sweden’s leading players in life insurance and financial services. With a long-term perspective and focus on sustainability, they help their customers achieve their financial goals responsibly.
Working within a small team at the agency, I handled a wide range of tasks, from designing reports, brochures, and informational sheets to designing templates for print materials and ongoing visual asset development.
Product FilmStoryboard and art direction for Skandia Omtanke, an offering ensuring that customers and their loved ones can continue to live meaningful and secure lives when they need extra help in everyday situations.
Watch with sound at Skandia’s website
Initial sketches together with Frida Borgstedt
Creative Direction by Anton Gårdsäter
3D and motion by Erik Norrhede
NewsletterSkandia wanted to modernize its digital newsletter and enhance the premium feel to highlight the emphasis they place on quality in their analyses.
This was achieved by aligning the design with Skandia’s updated visual identity, and by creating a stronger visual impression through a dynamic layout and a more editorial design language.
Initial sketches together with Hong Hui
Creative Direction by Anton Gårdsäter
Design Lead by Jonathan Jervelind
Development by Matías Salinas
Post- och Telestyrelsen (PTS)
Post- och telestyrelsen (PTS) – The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority is a government agency tasked with ensuring that telephony, broadband, and postal services are of high quality and accessible to all citizens, in an era where effective communication is crucial for an inclusive and well-functioning society.
For PTS, I served as Design Lead under Creative Director Anton Gårdsäter at Essen. I was responsible for UX, print materials, illustrations, and ongoing visual asset development.
Competition IdentitySince 2010, PTS hosts Innovationstävlingen, an annual competition supporting digital accessibility solutions, enhancing daily life for everyone.
Instead of creating new separate identities for each year’s theme, we helped PTS to create one main look and feel to be used for all future events. The new identity centers on building blocks symbolizing ideation and development stages, with a shiny diamond as the main graphic asset. All playfully floating around in a warm setting.
2D sketches from the final part of the process.
In collaboration with junior designer Joy Westerberg
Creative Direction by Anton Gårdsäter
3D and motion by Angelica Öberg
CampaignVisual concept and campaign site for PTS’s informational campaign about secure electronic signatures.
PTS launched a campaign to emphasize the importance of secure electronic signatures, and for this we created a visual concept and a campaign site with illustrations and imagery. With a focus on security and safety, we gave PTS’s illustration style a twist with slightly more depth and perspective.
In collaboration with junior designer Joy Westerberg
Creative Direction by Anton Gårdsäter
The Kinship Method
Book design, together with Samira Bouabana, and website for Margot Barolo’s project The Kinship Method.
In the project, designer Margot Barolo invited her colleagues Erik Björk, Mia Cullin, Andreas Nobel and Fredrik Paulsen to a group experiment where each designer made three chairs in three rounds – like a relay race or the game of telephone – based on the preceding group member’s creation.
BookThe book consists of photographs by Karin Björkqvist, texts written by the five designers, as well as transcripts of design therapy sessions held by Salka Hallström Bornold.
The layout of the transcript pages playfully echoes design elements found in the chairs, a theme of playfulness that extends to other parts of the book. The deliberate, almost brutalist placement of footnotes and headlines introduces a dynamic contrast to the elegant main typeface, mirroring the diverse ideas and styles manifested in the chairs themselves.
The book was among the chosen for the Svensk Bokkonst award in 2021 with the following justification (translated from Swedish):
“A sophisticated and dynamic book where the graphic design becomes an integral part of the narrative. All components of the book are activated through the graphic elements, which also serve as illustrations. The design creates entry points for interpreting and experiencing its content anew with each reading.”
WebsiteJust like how the chairs came to be, the website is inspired by, and builds upon, what came before.
The navigation, which takes its inspiration from the cover of the book, features summary- and detail elements that expand and become the sections that make up the site.
Sunday Sites is an ongoing project for encouraging people to explore the interconnection between art, poetry and the web.
Originating in 2020 as my bachelor graduation project at Beckmans College of Design, Sunday Sites involves virtual sessions held on Sundays, where participants and organizer spend two hours creating experimental websites using only HTML and CSS.
Each session is guided by a creative prompt, such as “Pick a song you like and make a site based on its title.”
After two hours of coding, we come together for a casual show-and-tell session, sharing and discussing our process and resulting creations. The websites are then showcased on SundaySites.cafe, functioning as the information hub and gallery for the project.
Some of my own creations for the project. Click here for the full list.
Since its inception in 2020, Sunday Sites has evolved organically, maintaining its core structure while gaining energy with a growing community. Alongside the regular sessions, I’ve had the opportunity to conduct several workshops as a guest teacher at Beckmans, all focused on the project.
In a testament to its community spirit, the project now sees its regular sessions organized by longtime contributor Tiana Dueck, while I take on a more background role as time permits.
An early version of the project website. Promotional photo for the graduation exhibition, by Albin Händig.
Tangents is a music magazine for digital natives. Translating the way we navigate the web to
printed matter. A magazine that aims to combine seemingly different music related topics by proposing how they
connect with each other.
The magazine’s look is heavily inspired by traditional large format newspapers like The New
York Times. In contrast, through eliminating headlines and blurring the start- and endpoints of the pieces, the
layout allows the reader to move through articles, quotes, forum posts and interviews in a non-hierarchical way.
The result is a more internet-inspired structure where the reader
should be able to dive into the magazine at any page and move on from there in any direction.
By linking the texts through underlining the contact points, the connections and transitions
are made easier for the reader to follow.
This first issue deals with the topics of noise, repetitive music and
techno culture.
We brought some green crayons to the release party and encouraged the guests to draw anything
they wanted on the cover. An homage to all those mindless scribbles people have done on newspapers through the
years.
Website with an interactive map over
alleged UFO sightings in Sweden.
While searching the Archives for the
Unexplained, we came across an Excel document titled ScanCat, which consists of thousands of UFO reportings, most of them from Sweden. We
decided to make that document more fun and engaging by bringing the data to life and focusing on the vague,
abstract, almost poetic quotes from the reports.
The project was part of a design relay where the whole class worked on
repurposing existing digital archives in teams of four. More credits can be found on the site.
Two typefaces in progress
1Björkis is the working name for this typeface inspired by
political posters from the 60’s and 70’s.
2 This is Äsch, or Aesch. Either one is fine – it doesn’t mind!
Education
2017 — 2020
VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Beckmans College of Design, Stockholm
2014 — 2016
GRAPHIC DESIGN & COMMUNICATION
Södra Vätterbygdens Folkhögskola, Jönköping
2013 — 2014
FILM STUDIES
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg
, a graphic designer living and working in Stockholm, Sweden.
For the past three years I’ve been working at Essen International, with clients such as
Skandia
and
PTS
.
Some of my other works include the book and website for furniture design project
The Kinship Method
, the creative coding community Sunday Sites
, a magazine for digital
natives by the name of Tangents
, the title design and poster for an award winning short film
& AFU
– a poetic archive over UFO sightings. I also like to make fonts
in my spare time.
