In addition to being an album by Jesus And The Mary Chain, Darklands is also a brand new fashion store in Berlin, Germany.

It features some of the most exclusive high-end men’s fashion brands, including Carol Christian Poell, Julius, Damir Doma, MA+, The Viridi-anne, Boris Bidjan Saberi, Undercover, Lumen et Umbra, Kosmetique Label, Augusta, Goti and Diet Butcher Slim Skin. The website is build on WordPress, with a simple custom theme based on the mono-space logo-type and huge, functional fonts. The only visual effect is the subtle fabric-like background, adding a material/industrial feel to the website.

In addition to, a showcase of the physical store, the website also displays an online catalogue. If you find something you like, just write them an e-mail and they will help you find your right size and ship it right off to your doorstep.

Visit the site at www.darklandsberlin.com

Sabroe, one of the best-known designers, specialist manufacturers and suppliers of high-quality refrigeration equipment in the world, wanted to have a simple memory game on their website.

Through the usages of a random set of images of products and other brand identity material, the game actually communicates the Sabroe concept.

The game utilizes an Adobe Flash element, a simple text file and a set of jpg-images loaded on-the-fly. The game can easily be adjusted and customized. Another version of the memory game was used as part of an e-learning system. Read about Flash games in e-learning here.

Try the game on Sabroe.com

Sprogbogen.dk is a free e-learning center, where you can practice your skills in Danish grammar, spelling etc. The site is a supplement to the book Sprogbogen.

Since 2001, I have been involved with the Netfidus-project, providing afforable online learning to schools around the country. From the outside, the system is relatively simple: chose a type of task, solve it and get your results. What makes it interesting, is the back end system. Through the utilization of both the knowledge and some of the technology from Netfidus we developed a simple task specification syntax and a back-end system that could handle these tasks. The task specification syntax is completely text based, therefore, there is no special design-interface required. To create a simple task where the user has to input the correct ending of a word, you simply type “He was run_ning_”. Here the user must type in ‘ning’ after ‘run’ to get a point. To create a task with a spelling mistake you type “This is spel(l)ed incorrectly”. Here the user will see the sentence “This is speled incorrectly”. To get a point he or she must put in the missing ‘l’ in spelled.

With simple syntax constructions like this, the editors of the site were able to build complex sets of tasks, training special skills.

My role in this project was to design the syntax and handle the practical implementation. Henceforth, I developed a plain demo for myself, however, for the actual coding and implementation, I hired a development company in Belarus, Minsk, which has also handled the latest revisions of the Netfidus platform. This has given me quite a lot of experience with outsourcing. However, I must admit that I’m not that qualified for this part of the project role. The fact that one finds oneself in the middle, between client and the development company can be very frustrating and time consuming.

During the past seven years I’ve been doing quite a lot of projects evolving  around the concept of e-learning. Most recently, I worked with Finanssektorens Uddanelsescenter (the Educational center for financial institutions) creating small games and other activities to give the user a break from the actual learning.

The games are of course customized to match the visual identity of the client’s existing system. The screenshot above is taken from a car racing game. In addition to being action packed, it is also a challenging motoring task, since the steering wheel is controlled by dragging the mouse to the left or right, while the acceleration and brakes are controlled by the keyboard.

In addition to the car game, you can also find a puzzle and memory game. You can read about the memory game here.

Try the game here.

On March 18th 2007, carpenter Flemming Wulff sent me an e-mail. He had heard about me at a conference for self-employed people, where Anne-Maria Dahl had mentioned me in her speech. In addition to his work as a carpenter, he is running a small production company which develops custom-made folding doors (see image).

At the moment, we are now working together on a strategy to present his high quality folding doors, as a trendy and unique alternative to having no doors at all or to your ordinary normal door.

Here you can check out my first website set-up: http://deluxefoldedor.dk/

This page will be updated as the project develops over time.

The Komakino Guerrilla Store is an amazing men’s store in Vancouver, BC. It moves to a new location every year, following the constant fashion flux. With every move, there appears a new website and for me it was an honour to design this year’s. First, I developed the version 2.0 website, with panoramic images of the physical store. When I was asked, to develop version 4.0, I wanted something more simplistic. At the time, I was completely obsessed with functional typography, especially the Helvetica font. Therefore, I decided to develop the site based on simple geometric shapes, the Helvetica font and the usage of black and white colours.

When you first see the website it is so minimalist that it is almost boring, but if you keep starring at it, you will notice that it is not as it seems. In your peripheral vision the borders are moving (very slowly). Sometimes the box expands, and sometimes it contracts. Combined with another subtle shaky -effect (which corresponds to certain elements of the eerie background music) the website can almost feel uncomfortable.

The store is currently in 7.0, but you can still visit the archived version 4.0 here. You can also read about the earlier version 2.0 here.

The idea of designing a website for a writer was a new challenge for me. Thorkild Borup has written several books about famous Danish authors including H. C. Andersen, Benny Andersen, Ludvig Holberg and Tom Kristensen. Therefore, he needed a simple website where the main focus would be on the text/words and he showed me a couple of examples from other websites.

I decided to keep the website sober, using black and white, with only a few highlights in red, and almost no graphic elements, except for a few illustrations. I wanted the lettering to look like a book so I used the Georgia font for the main text. I however still wanted the site to be just a little more dynamic, therefore I chose to incorporate the New Caledonia font in the main headings. The subtle effect to the site can be described as a subtle feel of old paper, implemented by the positioning of a watermark in the upper-left corner.

In order to facilitate the editing-process of the content, I designed a very simple CMS back-end.

LidtMereLuksusIHverdagen.dk is a personal shopping guide designed and researched by Pernille Skovbjergs home website . The site also is a clear statement about how websites can be more interesting, inspiring and feminine.

The website was designed around a somewhat weird metaphor, where an animal represents a partical shop or café. When you click on an animal it flips around and transforms into a post it-note.

An animal is also a post it-note.

The site was launched in May 2006 and was later updated in December 2006.

The site principally was an interactive experience. Unfortunately, the website was closed down in November 2008, since Pernille didn’t want to maintain it anymore. 

Komakino Guerrilla Store Version 2.0 is a high-end fashion store, built around a nomad-concept: the store moves to a new location every year! Currently it’s located in Vancouver, Canada.

The website shows real photos from the store in a panoramic view, giving the user the option to turn around in the open space, and a possibility to discover all the brands: Number (N)ine, Raf Simons, Rick Owens, Ann Demeulemeester, Costume National, Yohji Yamamoto, Viridi-anne and Mihara Yasuhiro.

The store is currently running version 6.0, but you can still visit the archived version 2.0 here. You can also read about version 4.0 here.

Quickwood is a US based sales company, specializing in products for the wood working industry. In 2001, I was approached by them because they needed a simple and bandwidth effective visualization of their latest product.

The product was still patent pending so I had to keep my mouth shut, and started working on the animation. I decided to use Flash, which at the time was still a relatively new thing on the Internet. Using simple ActionScript programming the video uses almost no bandwidth, and Quickwood was pleased with the result. They later decided to develop the animation further, adding stacking robots to each end of the conveyer belt, and speeding it up to give a more realistic example of how the actual production belt would look.

Consumption of goods has become an activity involving ever more products and choices and ever younger consumers. Today, shopping is considered a normal activity for teenagers. However, in a market governed by complex and opaque laws of commerce, being young and unexperienced can make shopping rather haphazardous. Especially, when it comes to warranties and return policies.

Sikker Shopping (“Safe Shopping”) is an online education system that helps teenagers become better shoppers. The system is built around a story frame where the user must first chose a cyber friend. Tests amongst users have shown, that this first seemingly unimportant step is extremely important for the user’s feeling of being involved in what happens (the selection of a cyber friend).

After choosing and customizing a cyber friend, the user can proceed to actual game. In this part, the user is presented with quizzes of varying length. Each quiz rewards the user with an appropriate score depending on the correctnes of the answers.

Chosing the right cyber friend is extremely important to the teenage users.

The quizzes incorporate text, images and video and the cyber friend is always around to assist.

The sytem was designed by Warnich IT. The short ,ovies were produced by Puste Grise Op Productions. Most of the technical implementations of the quiz module wer conducted by me.

Try Sikker Shopping (in Danish)

Read more about the project (in Danish)

Learning a language is never easy. Even your native language has grammar and spelling that you need to maintain and develop, if you want to communicate properly. Dansklærerforeningens Forlag is a Danish publishing house that specializes in educational material for teaching Danish in Denmark.

In 2001 when online-learning was still a relatively new and unexploited format, Jakob Lave from the publishing house approached me with an idea: he wanted a simple and intuitive, Flash-based interface where young students could play around in a creative way. I was just 16 at the time and I was thrilled to be involved in this project.

The first version of the system was launched in 2002. The features included a cartoon designer, where the user can actually design little comic strips by dragging around pre-made illustrations on the screen, a memory game, a wheel of fortune game, a syllable game and an action packed “shoot the flying letters” game. Later, a book designer and a puzzle game were also added.

Today, the technology has been upgraded to support more users and more data production (ASP->ASP.NET and MS Access->MS SQL). New applications were added, however, the system basically remained the same.

In close collaboration with illustrator Poul Carlsen, I developed a Flash-based system that can handle crossword puzzles online.

The system was built in 2005.