500 posts in 5 years

Exactly five years and 500 posts ago, on the 5th of October 2006 I started a blog and called it 'Creative in London'. I just moved to the English capital to pursue a career in advertising – an adventure in itself that together with this blog was (and still is) a great ride seasoned with ups and downs, exciting times and dry spells. From London to Hamburg to Stockholm to Tokyo this blog has seen me changing countries, jobs, creative partners, agencies, universities, interests and haircuts. Back then I didn't really have a clue what I was doing with this website – it was just for fun. Reflecting on everything now I can point out three themes that became dear to me and kept me blogging through good and bad:

The first thing is that this is a great way to document my journey and have a diary of sorts. The second thing is that I write here to keep myself thinking, questioning and reflecting, it's a collection of thoughts. The third reason is to share what I find moving or interesting and to connect with others through these thoughts and findings.

Every time I open this website I'm more than happy that I never stopped writing. I'm curious what the next 500 posts will be like. I hope they will be different as change is good. I will share more about culture, food, fashion and the bigger picture of creativity. But of course there will be advertising. It's still what I'm doing. Thanks for sticking around and reading this, I appreciate it. Comments and thoughts are always welcome. This blog is as much for me as it's for the ones reading it.

One final look in the rear mirror, eleven posts from the past that were defining, interesting, funny or random, enjoy:

1. Games – the real new media
2. Leo Lab Landing
3. Interview with David Droga
4. Rum alchemy
5. Reflections from my internship at W+K Tokyo
6. My lunch tale (creative writing)
7. Workshop with IDEO
8. Drawing of Spikey
9. A creative team for today
10. Advertising & Art
11. The Hyper Island Way

The Styleograph

This weekend I ran into the Styleograph, a quite talented street fashion photographer. Do check out his blog, it's rather lovely.

Postwal-it

For the reception area of W+K Tokyo everyone took a portrait outside the office with a thing of our choice, above is mine. Photographer: Will Goodan

Reflections on 2009

Happy new year everyone! An important thing I learned at Hyper Island is to reflect on past events and evaluate them to maximize the learning outcome. Let's give it a go and look at the past year:

After teaming up with copywriter Jai in 2008 and completing creative placements in London at Wieden+Kennedy, Leo Burnett, Lowe and Adam&Eve the year 2009 kicked off with us two turning into a creative freelance team. Our first gig was at Agency Republic which continued through January and February. Even though we worked on interactive briefs before this place was the first one with full on commitment to that. Looking at all the great digital work going on around the world got me pretty excited about new possibilities to engage with people in new ways. Yet when working on set briefs we found ourselves thinking often in stereotypical categories like banners, pop-ups, virals and minisites – not very. Countless banner concepts later in March we moved on to our next freelance gig at The Bank where we helped them winning a pitch for Grolsch. In the meantime we got to meet some brilliant creative directors like Graham Fink and Dave Trott and received invaluable advice from them.

This was quite motivating and the goal was clear, the portfolio needed work so we could land a permanent position at a creative agency – but Jai and I didn't agree on how to get there and thus finished our creative partnership in May. Footloose I started planning my next steps and spend the summer in Kazakhstan. My curiosity about creative work in the interactive space led me to an unexpected option: A post graduate course in Sweden at Hyper Island. A lot of research got me hooked on this idea and I applied for the Interactive Art Director course. After an intensive application process I got admitted to this great course and I packed my things and move from London to Stockholm in August. The course started off surprising me completely. I understood that Hyper Island was not only going to be about ideas but also about the How side of things. Team behavior, facilitating of processes, leadership, giving and receiving feedback and communication in general – all splendid learnings that pushed me on another level. On top of that I've met many new people that I now consider friends.

The second module continued in September with us interviewing the industry to gain insights about their needs and their future. Those learnings were accompanied by great lectures from the industry that kept surprising me weekly. All of this combined fruited in the first competition win for our work on Lipton that we presented in Paris. It's currently in production by Tribal DDB and I can't wait for it to see the light of day. 2009 was also the foray of my sister Anna into the world wide web where she presented two of her collections, expect more to come. The last few months of the year were spent working intensively on projects with Burn, North Kingdom, IKEA and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, oh joy.

The undeniably biggest change of 2009 was leaving London and starting at Hyper Island. It wasn't an easy decision, but this adventure has been a fantastic one and taught me many things that I am very grateful for. For me it was the year of the unexpected, change, more questions and the year of new learnings.

Now and it's time to look at this new year ahead and set goals – in the next post.

Milestone

This is the 400th post on this blog, Yay!
Hyper Island keeps me pretty busy. Many things are going on at the same time. First we have the main seven weeks assignment to create an interactive experience for a french clothing brand. Second we received a brief from Goodby, Silverstein + Partners who are visiting enxt week to create a campaign based around 5 senses and pitch it to them with finished designs. Third we're gathering a team and ideas in order to produce the main promotion site for our class. And in my spare time I'm working on briefs for upcoming competitions like One Show and D&AD, as there is no time scheduled for this in our course. Busy, but awesome. Back to work. Thanks for reading.

The Hyper Island Way

During our first idea development session in module 2 we were filmed in order to give people a little glance what Hyper Island is about. This is the result.

Wal in Kazakhstan

As I have some time off I've taken a flight and arrive in Almaty, Kazakhstan last Friday. I haven't been here for over three years now so I'll have two weeks to visit my grand parents, explore the city and do some packaging design and print advertising for my Dad's company.

The weather is great, it's super hot, around 30 degrees and it's a complete different world. It looks like my camera charger died on me so I'm taking blurry pictures on my iPhone which I'll share below. If all works out I should be back in London on the 15th of June.

And no, it's not like in Borat's movie.

Jai / Wal

We've been holding that down for a bit but we'll share it now. We're not a creative team anymore as we've split up. The main reason is that we have different ambitions in advertising and they don't seem to go along. We still have a couple of projects we're working on together and it would be awesome if they work out. Jai' accepted another three months at the Bank which he's following up at the moment. I'm making a new plan. I applied for a postgraduate course outside of London and I'm waiting for a reply. In the meantime I'll be looking around and speaking to agencies on my own. See what happens.

Quick one

Quick update, we'll post more when deadlines allow. Busy at the Bank. Got tickets for the NABS talk next week, it's a great lineup. Also thinking about going to Portfolio Night 7 in Amsterdam, why not? And it looks like some agencies are looking for talent, which is good news. Maybe intersting stuff happening. No swine flu between us yet.

Back to business

After the the cold winter hibernation we warmed up and put together our plan of action for the next weeks. We're excited. The first part is to bring the ideas we gathered over the holiday season to life and on paper. We can't wait to share them with people.

End of Movember

Jai & Wal

Happy New Year! С новым годом! Sal Mubharak!

The latter two are in Russian and Gujarati, spoken by the two of us. Oh and by the way the two of us are Jai and Wal. Here’s a really quick intro (a more in depth version of our saga will soon follow) we met back in college, had a ton of fun and did some pretty good work together. However life after Bucks led to a fork in the road, and we went in different directions.

Late last year our paths once again crossed and with a bit of luck we got selected for Cream 07. It kind of made us realise how much we missed ‘us’. So we made up our minds and promised that in the new year we would team up and make 2008 our year.

We’re now rested, armed and poised for what London has to throw at us, with our sleeves bursting with adventures, ideas, hunger and ambition. We hope you’ll join us for the ride. So stay tuned and get ready, Creative in London has now entered the year of the pig!

Wal Scissorhands

Halloween arrived pretty early this year, our lovely neighbours had a party with the topic Tim Burton. Anyone fancies a haircut?

Creative divorce

Yepp, sad but true. Kristin & Waldemar are going separate ways. It took us a while but we decided that we aren't better together as a creative team. We think a team should be stronger than the sum of its members. We gave it a couple of tries but finally decided today. In the beginning it's going to be hard – in the long run though it should pay off. Kristin will continue doing great work at the BMB placement. Waldemar will continue writing this blog, starting next week.

Don't worry, we still are friends. Enjoy your weekend.

My special place

Just before our current placement I spend a week with my girlfriend in this very very calm place. We went to Sylt, an island in northern Germany. It used to be part of the main land but is shrinking due to erosion by the Northern Sea.

It was such a refreshing time without the hectic stress and all the people. Only this very small island – surrounded by the northern sea. Ah, that truly was a good place to get ideas, I close my eyes and try to go back there now as the briefs keep coming in and ask us for creative solutions... it's a retreat in my mind, to go back to, and be inspired, by the emptiness and calmness.

Crossing over with our car on a train towards the sun

The nature there is quite unique, very much untouched

Most of the houses on Sylt have 'Friesen' style roofs, they look lovely. © Túrelio (via Wikimedia-Commons CC-BY-SA) 

The whole east coast of the island consist of wadden sea, as the tide goes back you can walk it

We were lucky to catch some sunny days – kisses to you Zhanna!

Sand impressions

The west coast is covered with one of the most beautiful beaches in Germany – we shall go back during summer

We surely couldn't miss out on preparing some delicious 'Spinte mit Kräuterbutter'

Nightmare dentist

Today I am alone at the Grand Union. Val flew out to Germany this morning to get his teeth done. I just hope everything worked out well and the 'hey what do you think about having soup for lunch today?' period is over. Even Pret only offers 5 different soups to choose from. Well. In the meantime I was finishing stuff off for EST, Energy saving trust and did some concepts for Sony Singstar. It worked out quiet well as I was working together with Stu from the GU. Val, get better sooooon ;-)

P.S. The Grand Union welcomes the two new Playstation3's on board

Russian 1/2 year celebration

Today is a wonderful day, the sun is shining in London, it's slightly warm, we think about summer already and we have the taste of vodka in our mouths. We went to short trip to russia yesterday, just for a couple of hours. We had drink (and dinner as a sidedish) in the Borshtch n' Tears russian restaurant, with our friends Marco & Daniel. Usually real russians don't go to a restaurant in order to eat or drink - they do this at home - they go out to celebrate, dance like crazy or swing around the chandelier. So did we. Our reason was that Kristin & Waldemar have been a creative team for more than half a year now and also came to London on this day, six months ago, the first of october.

The food sure must have been good, but we don't really remember. Only by looking again on the bill today we found out what we had, and why we cannot remember, all this vodka - Nazdarovye! We shall drink to another six months!

After looking at the bill we needed another vodka, we all spent to much

Val's old old homepage

Just been googling my name (I wouldn't believe anyone saying he or she never done that!) and found some old stuff on the internet, like my very first homepage. The website is still online mostly for sentimental reasons and as a reminder for me to make a new one. Well, I wanted to make a new one for about 3 years now, dozens of layouts later still nothing happened - it's so much easier having a blog isn't it?

Anyway magicstyle.net is now over 6 years old, Kristin says it looks like I was a geek before, maybe she's right? (ok I was into fantasy back in high school when I did this website).

Sorry for those who can't read german, but you won't miss much. Also found that I still have an account on deviantArt. I am really motivated to do more design again, all this black marker white layout pad thing is pretty good for ad ideas, but where is the beauty in that? Yes I'm a design addict and I'm thinking about getting hooked again...

I feel like posting one of these 'five things you don't know about me' entries - probably feeling the urge since we never got tagged.

Studio52 *unfurnished*

I spent some time today to design a flyer for our party. Since I finally found a home in London in a brand new flatshare, we will be celebrating this friday at our place. If you would like to join in drop me a line to mail@waldemar-wegelin.com

Week's over

This week has gone by quite fast. We went to a couple of agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather, BBH and WCRS. We worked on a great brief here at Drugstore and we'll start to work on a pitch next week. Unbelievably I finally got the keys to my place. Yes! I am finally a proper London tenant – I'll move in tomorrow to a stunning apartment near Aldgate East. It took me and my friend Daniel a lot of time to find two other people for a flatshare, but now it's all taken care of, we signed the contract today, and I can relieve my friends Ian, Hannah, Jordan & Bill who were so kind to let me stay at there place for the last couple of weeks – thanks a lot guys!

So before everyone takes off into the weekend relax your brains and laugh about our business with a short but amusing animation of flags of different countries – and the comments a client would make on them. Check it out here.