First of all, we would like to know how did you start being interested in arts and illustration and how did you end up being a professional graphic designer.
It's hard to say when the interest started, but for as long as I can remember I've enjoyed drawing. I guess that most kids get a pencil put in their hands at some point, but for me it just stuck. While my classmates were busy with stick figures, I tried to apply real perspective and shading (with dubious results, but still...) to my dinosaur drawings. When getting involved in the underground metal scene in the late ’80’s, I started making demo tape covers and flyers for bands, which often just were favors or done for free in a “support the scene” mindset, but it was a good starting point. I then studied art at the university for a while before getting involved with web design and after a while I started taking artwork commissions on the side and found myself being "professional", at least in the sense of getting paid for designing, ha ha!
What was your first professional work as a designer? What are your impressions many years later?
The first design work that I’d consider professional in the sense that it was for an internationally released album on a big label was actually the Dark tranquillity “Projector” CD back in 1998. That was the beginning of doing “real” work, and to this day I think that it’s one of the best projects I’ve been working on. There’s a lot of symbolism and personal connections to every single component of the artwork, and I still remember how excited I was realizing that what I was seeing on my computer soon would be visible in record stores. I also remember that I got a lot of the technical details wrong (no bleed on the images, not knowing about the safety margin for text etc), but Carsten Drescher at Century media’s in-house layout department was very patient with my lack of experience.
What are the main sources of inspiration or influences in your work?
Ah, the dreaded inspiration question, ha ha! The short answer would be that I think that everything that one experiences in some way provides a source of influence. Creativity comes from the sum of one’s experiences and can often work in mysterious ways. It’s very rare that I consciously do something with the purpose of getting inspired; it’s more a case of trying to feed the mind with impressions that will favor the right mindset. Someone said that in order to become a great musician you need to get out and live a full life rather than staying in your bedroom practicing scales, and it's a bit like that with design as well. One needs to stay curious and fill the head with good stuff - be it music, books, movies or just everyday life - and then that will hopefully be inspiring in itself.
Could you list a top 3 of the projects you’re more satisfied of and the reason why?
This is quite hard. I actually don’t spend much time thinking about already finished projects. It’s the same thing with music; the interesting part is the actual creative process. Once something is finished - be it a song or an album layout - it's not intersting anymore. I’m mentally done with it and happy to forget about it and proceed to the next project. Of course I can feel satisfied with some of the old stuff, but I’m really pedantic and tend to focus on the one pixel that could have been done differently. Also, this is still commercial illustration, meaning that the client has the right to get what he pays for and the right to (for example) see a couple of different versions of an idea and pick the one he likes the most. On most of the projects I've worked with, my own taste doesn't match the client's to 100%, so the version that ends up on a CD cover is not the version that I would have chosen myself. "Great cover, but we need you to put a skull in the centre of the image" is a phrase I've heard more than once, ha ha!
But to answer your question:
Arch Enemy - Rise of the Tyrant
Different for its time, and it was a great relief that someone didn't want me to do the typical layer-on-layer photoshop cover.
Dark Tranquillity - Projector
My first “real” artwork/layout project for an established label, and to this day I think that the visuals fit the lyrics and music and capture the mood of the band in a good way. The illustrations themselves are far from perfect, but it has other qualities.
In Flames - Reroute To Remain
The style is definitely a bit dated today, but the whole project was very rewarding with a lot of interesting stuff done for the limited editon versions and so forth.
We’ve noticed that some of you work is music related, do you listen to those bands’ music when you are designing for them? Can this be applied to Dark Tranquillity or Laethora, I mean, do you listen to your own music when you are designing covers for them?
Not very often. With the bands I play in myself, I know every note inside and out anyway, so there’s no real need to remind myself about it. I'm too involved in those bands to allow me to just be a listener of the music. Otherwise, I make sure to listen and read up on every band I work with to get a better understanding of who they are and what their “place” is in the music world, but that’s a different thing than listening to songs during the process to distill some kind of inspiration. If I’m in the planning/brainstorming phase, I tend to not listen to anything at all, but when I’m drawing/painting/Photoshopping, something non-intrusive and ambient is usually better. These days I’m mainly listening to podcasts when working.
You are a graphic designer/illustrator, a photographer, a musician and you even have directed some videos with Aduro Labs. Do you have a favorite way of artistic expression or it depends of what you want to express?
It really depends, and it goes in cycles as well. I guess that there are both pros and cons of doing a little of everything. I’m not a technically perfect photographer or director by any means, but I believe that if one has a decent eye for visuals and the right mindset, there are lots of things that transfer between mediums. The benefit of this is that I rarely get tired of doing the same. For example, I was a bit overworked with doing artwork last autumn, but after having spent several months in the studio for the new D.T. album (finished yesterday!), I'm extremely motivated to get back into designing and have a lot of visual ideas. If one does the same thing all the time it's easier to get bored. The downside might be that that true genius often requires a lifelong 100% devotion to one thing solely. But I'm happy with doing a little bit of everything.
What is your all-time favorite artistic movement? Why?
It's a boring reply, but I never had all-time faves with anything. Music, books, movies. If one digs deep enough, every movement or current probably has something interesting to offer if the quality is there. I can appreciate an old Albrecht Dürer woodcut as well as a Banksy piece or even generative art created entirely from computer computations.
What tools –digital or physical- would you recommend to someone starting in this craft?
It’d depend on what goals one has, but in general it’s always advisable to get a proper start with traditional media. There are of course exceptions, but in most cases the people whose digital work is really outstanding also are good at drawing and painting the old fashioned way. I’d recommend spending as much time as possible doing things like taking still drawing classes, learning about architecture, photography, cartooning, pottery - anything that that can teach you about composition, visual dynamics, colour theory and creativity in general. When I started out, the software and techincal skills were learned though classes or books, but these days there's tremendous amount of free information available online.
If -in these global hard times- a young designer wanted to start his/her own studio, what advices would you give to him/her?
I guess that the most important advice - apart from the obvious one of working hard and constantly try to improve - is to stay realistic and not have too many illusions about what you want to accomplish. It’s the same thing as with music; it’s great to have big ambitions and dreams, but even better to break them down and try to picture what “making it” really means and what skills outside of the main craft that one might need. I’m not sure how things are these days, but at least 10-15 years ago there were many people from different design schools complaining that while their education taught them invaluable skills, they learned nothing about the real world of deadlines, business/administrational hassle, self promotion and so on.
It’s also a matter of what you want to do. Starting an own studio as a one-man operation freelancing from your home is different than opening up a physical space with employees and so forth, and there probably are many factors that differ a lot depending on where you live and what the current industry situation (as well as the economy in general) looks like. So get in touch with designers in your local community and see what they have to say.
If you could describe your work in only 3 words or adjectives, which ones would you use?
No idea, ha ha! Sorry, but for some reason I usually suck at these self-description questions. There’s no real mission statement behind my work and I never give these things much thought, so instead of trying to spend an hour trying to come up with something clever, I'll just jump to the next question.
What would be your design related dream gig? (to design to artwork for your favorite band, a movie poster, redesign the package of a product, anything goes…)
At this point, I’m mainly interested in exploring animation and motion graphics design further, but I don’t really have a dream client or anything. There are of course many people whose I love and would be super excited to collaborate with, but in reality there are so many other factors that determine if a project is successful or rewarding or fun. If we're talking about dream gigs, I’d be more interested in personal projects that would tell a meaningful narrative or being new challenges to the table. For example, I’m totally blown away by Alessandro Bavari’s “Metachaos” video. I’ve admired his photographic work since I first saw some images in the Mac art & design magazine in 1998 or so, and now he has made an eight minute short film that captures the bleak monumentality of his visual world in a truly captivating way. If I can create something like that, I’d be a happy man, and it’d be far more interesting than landing - say - an album layout gig for an artist whose music I happen to like and that might be a total nightmare to work with, ha ha!
What can be found in your trilogy of books called Gadus Morhua?
They’re basically scanned sketchbooks. During tours and travels I kill time compulsively doodling around, and many people that saw the drawings suggested that I should do something with them. At first it felt a bit self-indulgent to release them in book form, but since I was getting constant requests I thoughts that I should make them available.
As much as one can always strive to create unique things in digital art, pen and paper is always more personal. It’s like a fingerprint or a voice; there’s something recognizable that can’t be fully replicated by anyone else. I didn’t want to make a big thing out of it, so the books are more of a bonus thing for the people that enjoy the drawings. It’s also a way for me to document things. I have tons of these sketchbooks randomly scattered around in different places, and having some of the stuff collected in a “real” book is pretty nice. With almost every drawing I can remember the time and place when it was made - be it on a plane to Venezuela, a vacation in Prague or just being bored at a crappy weekend job a teenager. I never was good at keeping a real diary, so this serves a similar purpose.
One last question, as a musician and an artist, if you could write a song as a companion audio for piece of art (from any time, modern or classic…) which onewould you choose? How would it sound?
Wow - this won’t be easy, ha ha! Almost any good work of art can trigger musical ideas, so it’d be hard to pick. My first reaction would be to create really complex and off-the-wall music to something like an old Hieronymus Bosch painting, but the question is whether or not the music itself should be historically accurate or a modern representation. Just by utilizing electric guitars or even using a computer for the recording and mixing, one creates a separation from the original work if it was created in a different period. At the same time, that can be said about films portraying an historical era as well. I'm also getting increasingly intested in sonification - to distill information from something that then gets re-processed and converted into audio. This means that one would set algorithms for transforming information that's already inherent in a piece of art and turn it into actual music. For example, different colour values of a painting could be mapped to different notes and a system could be devised for how the information is processed. I think that this could be more interesting than just trying to write original music that's inspired by a piece of art. Oh well, getting carried away here. But thanks for the interview and all the best!
You can check out Niklas’ work here:
You can purchase Gadus Morhua here:
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