Palinola

Update to the main site! Yay!

Also: I’m alive! Yay for that as well!

I’m leaving Karlskrona tomorrow.

Arguably, going on vacation a week before school’s out is cheating a bit, but let’s not get hung up on details.

Anyways, I will first be going home to sleep in my own bed for a few hours, then be dragged back into a plane and groan all the way to Portland, Oregon. We will cartour a bit on the northwest coast of the U.S., then enter Canada and mull about there for a few days before heading back down to Portland for a big event (basically, my dad is getting us over there for a massive choir meetup… let’s see how that works out.).

After all that, I suppose I’ll be lounging at homehome for a while before sorting out my apt. here in KNA to be presentable to whichever sorry tenant will get it next.

Also, hunting for a place to stay in the U.K. (all depending on where I end up for my Internship)

Yes, I am actually alive.

The past few months have been crazy and fun. Since my last post we’ve been to London to launch our site with a massive party, then the real work started. By real work I mean real clients. In The Project Lifecycle, my group was working for a group of very entertaining clients - Fluffbabes, a company dedicated to making everyday life a bit more glamorous. They wanted us to help them plan their online strategy, and together with suggestions on ways to market themselves we also designed a new blog and a flashy intro page (that will be online soon).

This was followed by work for SVT (Swedish Television) in the second design specialisation module, producing an entirely new profile for the revamped version of the show “Djursjukhuset” (The Animal Hopital). Included in this was a title sequence, two scene-breakers, credits, complete design of their website and ideas for further development to expand on their online value. SVT has decided to make our design official, and after doing some work with it, they will use it for the real thing.

Right now I’m in The Industry Project, where the whole class has been divided into groups of 16, imitating the structure of a real agency. Our PMs are learning organisational skills, we grunts are learning how it feels to work for real and learn how balance in real projects works. Currently I’m involved in producing a profile and website for a company that owns a set of cottages on a small carribean island. It’s fun stuff, and I’m sure it’ll be a cool product in the end.

Also, I finally managed to update my portfolio - perhaps due to this strange maladie that has stricken me since we got proper working hours (no “about 10″ to “when it’s done”, it’s 8 hours a day and then the boss kicks you out) or perhaps it’s everybody else around me getting internships. Either way, I have some more work up now, and it makes me feel a lot better about the minimalist style I chose for the whole thing.

It’s been quite a while, and I apologize for the delay, but now it’s online.

The incredibly spartan website of Palinola is up.

Now I’m off for a few days. Ciao!

Finally got this wordpress malarkey figured out.

Everything from the old weblog is henceforth relocated here.

I haven’t been very active here, have I?

No big loss, I suppose, since nobody is reading this (Google Analytics tells me as much).

Anyways. With the Portfolio Module starting now I’ve gone back to drawing plans for my site, and to transplant all the stuff here to go there.

Good luck with that.

Thank you.

A long and complicated string of SID-sounds follow.

Should be finished and up on www.darkmagenta.net by Wednesday.

Finally!

Achievement unlocked!

Today we had the presentation to our potential investors, and I have to say that it went quite well! They said that our presentation was very good and that we had good answers to the questions we got. In the end they said that our concept was interesting, but that they weren’t ready to invest any money just jet - however, with some change of focus and attaching a notable artist to our idea their decision would change. Jocke was grinning when we left the room, declaring it the best possible outcome and I’m inclined to agree with him.

Sure, it would have been awesome to know that we had an excellent idea and that we could choose to go with it if we wanted to, but we are at Hyper to learn and in many ways, failing is better for that purpose. The reason I think this “no, but yes” answer was the best is that it is both a success and a failiure - we unlocked the 100% learning achievement. As I always declare a few times in a module, it’s all about a group choosing between two paths - either people do what they’re good at, and the result is excellent but nobody learns anything, or everybody picks an area they want to learn something in and the whole group learns even though progress will be slower and the end result might not be 100% perfect. In this project I feel this group chose the second path and that we all learned a lot (despite the occasional panic attacks from looming deadlines).

Achievement Unlocked: Maximal learning in the module Concept & Development.

EDIT: I just realized I haven’t described our actual concept, so I’ll see if I can upload our High Concept Document (concise description) and Business Plan (Crunch) to Palinola.com asap.

The trigger is you

The german telecom company T-Mobile is sueing other companies on the digital market for using the colour Magenta. In a possibly futile attempt to oppose them, or at least to give them a digital finger, I have made some alterations to the style of my weblog (as you should have noted).

Read more at: http://www.stijlfigurant.nl/magenta/

Sunday bloody sunday.

I haven’t written in a while, and I suppose there have been some occurrences worth filling you in on.

First of all, Experience Technology has been concluded. This is a video with Jesper demonstrating our strange cube from beyond.

The exhibition went well, despite some minor technical difficulties I believe the day was a success. A lot of people seemed genuinely impressed and interested in our strange device, even if a few were confounded by the overall lack of usefulness of our otherwise spectacular device.

In other news, our third Project Module - Concept & Development - has started. The idea is for us to come up with a business idea and then pitch it to a board of potential financiers. The first week was spent getting to know the group (Jocke, Tilde, Rebecca and Peter) and coming up with 50 business ideas (which was our first assignment). A lot of brainstorming was done, and the picking of our Top-5 ideas was done during a group dinner at Rebecca’s place.

This week started with picking the idea we’re going to develop, and we will now start doing research on how to make business on it.

In other news: Shortly after writing the last post, I purchased Valve’s “The Orange Box” through Steam, mostly to get my hands on Portal and Team Fortress 2, but also found that in addition to those two and the well-marketed Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Valve had chosen to include the original Half-Life 2 and HL2: Episode 1! Thus I and Jocke have spent the last few days thinking up conspiracy theories around Aperture Science and playing through Half-Life 2 with its Episodes.

To my fellow classmates and other Hyper Island-people who might read this and find themselves to be Valve fans - I have started a group on the Steam Community called Aperture Hypernautical.

I’m still alive…