Creative Industry Report: Hello Monday

3 Reasons You’ll Love Hello Monday, You Won’t Believe No. 3!

Hello Monday – Just the perfect balance of fun and serious.

Hello Monday's Instagram
Hello Monday’s Instagram

When it comes to user interface/user experience (UI/UX) design, Hello Monday is sure to steal the hearts of many people. They are a creative studio specializing in digital branding, products and experiences. Named ‘Hello Monday’ because they aim to make Mondays better for everyone, they create delightful and explorative concepts to their clients though whimsical illustrations and micro-interactions that are sure to be only executed by meticulous professionals in their fields of web design and development.

Hello Monday currently has three offices in two countries (two in Aarhus and Copenhagen, Denmark and one in New York City, USA). Founded in 2006 by founding partners Rasmussen, Anders Jessen and Jeppe Aaen, Hello Monday is now made up of a team of 38 Mondayteers (Hello Monday’s employees) and boasts a total of 117 awards, including the Favourite Websites Award (FWA) and Global Association for Creative Advertising & Design (D&AD) awards. Its portfolio includes some of the clients include well-known organisations like Google, Youtube and MoMA.

 

Hello Monday Landing Page
Hello Monday Landing Page

01. Their deliver the whole package: experimental micro-interactions to explorative concepts.

Hello Monday projects include an incredible level of meticulousness from experimental micro-interactions to the larger design concepts.

One exemplary project is this project in collaboration with artist and performer Erika Senft Miller in which they designed a website to document her works. The concept of the site, free-exploration, is well-researched and actively mirrors the concept of Erika’s works as well.

Example: Erika Senft Miller's Portfolio Site
Example: Erika Senft Miller’s Portfolio Site

On the site, users would have to drag around the virtual space with their mouse, giving them the liberty to freely navigate the virtual space and explore the artist’s works. As you move around, the decorative lines in the background of the page make way for the cursor, creating an interesting interaction. The colours of the page would even change according to the day the project was held!

Early wireframing stage of Erika's portfolio site
Early wireframing stage of Erika’s portfolio site
Hello Monday's extensive process documentation
Hello Monday’s extensive process documentation

The best of it all is that Hello Monday documents their projects really well, from start to finish, including all their conceptualising and wireframing processes so visitors to the site are able to better appreciate the behind-the-scenes, and not just the final product.

For more projects with experimental digital interactions and experiences,  check these really cool ones out:

  1. Hollow – in collaboration with artist Kate Paterson
  2. Greenpeace – Into the Arctic
  3. Headbanger – An AI Experiment

02. They’re driven by passion and philanthropy.

Hello Monday also embarks on many meaningful and philanthropic projects such as Jeans for Refugees in collaboration with artist Johny Dar, where they created a website to showcase the jeans from celebrities which were artistically modified by the artist, meant to be auctioned off for a global charity fundraiser to help refugees worldwide.

Example: Jeans for Refugees
Example: Jeans for Refugees – in collaboration with Johny Dar

The micro-interactions of particles coming together to form the names of celebrity jeans donors mimic the hand-drawn art style of Johny Dar, and the way he artistically modifies the jeans.

Artistically modified jeans from celebrities by Johny Dar
Artistically modified jeans from celebrities by Johny Dar

For more projects with a philanthropic intention, check these ones out:

  1. One Day in my World – in collaboration with Witness Change
  2. Virunga National Park – Saving the gorillas of Congo

03. They have office mums!

Yes, they really do!

As if their top-notch quality work was not enough, Hello Monday is supported with a fantastic office culture. They have ‘office moms’ who act as “cultural coordinators”. They do not have to be female and they help to manage the office and prepare homemade lunch for the office. A glance through Hello Monday’s social media feed also shows how they frequently organise events for the whole team to get together and go on vacations. From the looks of it, Hello Monday is not just another digital agency, but more like a close-knitted family.

Hello Monday's screening event
Hello Monday’s screening event

Hello Monday’s website also features a comprehensive list of principles to which the Mondayteers align with, called their ‘Code of Honor‘.

Hello Monday's Code of Honour

Hello Monday's Code of Honour
Hello Monday’s Code of Honour

These are great principles not just for the Mondayteers, but for all designers to be aware of as well to strike a nice balance between being serious but also being able to have fun with their design work. With this amazing work culture, it is no wonder Hello Monday is constantly able to deliver great projects.

Conclusion

Hello Monday is a great inspiration to me as a designer as they are the perfect marriage between having fun and being serious at the same time. Their projects are proof that even serious topics can be made fun and memorable through intentional design. They also remind me to never stop exploring and experimenting. If anything, chancing upon Hello Monday has sure made my Mondays better. 😀

Find out more about Hello Monday here:
https://www.hellomonday.com/work

https://www.behance.net/hellomonday

https://medium.com/@mbuzzard/studio-profile-hello-monday-35db0644e92a

https://www.awwwards.com/sites/hello-monday

https://thefwa.com/profiles/hello-monday

https://thefwa.com/agency-spotlight/hello-monday

https://www.commarts.com/features/hello-monday

STRÄNG

STRÄNG Final Installation by Brendan, Bryan and Yue Ling

 

End-of-Sem Project Proposal:

 

STRÄNG

(Time-Space Warp Simulation)

 

STRÄNG is a wordplay on Doctor Strange’s name (who bends space and time) which means ‘string’ in Swedish and is also coincidentally related to the string theory about how our reality is shaped.

 

A superpower simulation that mimics the bending of space and time. There will be a clock mimicked by a running LED strip with RGB bulbs. There will be a one way mirror layer in front of the LED to create an infinity mirror illusion. The mirror will have a circular hole cut in the middle so that people can move their hands inside, and be able to touch a sheet of felt material. The RGB lights will change from blue to red across the rainbow spectrum when they do so (will add sound if time permits), and the running lights will start running at a slower speed.

Aside from that, there will be a servo motor behind a larger sheet of the same felt material away from the mirror that responds to the action by moving the sheet, thus creating the illusion that the participant’s hands are moving the sheet without actually touching the sheet. Whenever the motor moves, the LED lights around the frame of the material sheet will light up as well. In this sense, participants can feel like they are bending both time and space.

Things needed:

  1. LED strip
  2. Wood material for the box (probably will be spray-painted)
  3. (Elastic) Felt material
  4. Frame to hold felt material
  5. Servo-motor (have to fix something on it)
  6. Diffuser frame (borrow from film store)
  7. Ultra-sonic sensors/touch sensors.
  8. Speakers (If time permits)

 

Stuff to code for:

  1. Code for LED running strip (colours and speed)
  2. Servo motor.
  3. Response between touch sensor in the box and the servo motor on the other side

 

 

In the end, we had 2 main codes and used 2 Arduino circuit boards. One was for linking the LEDs and ultrasonic sensor while the other was for linking the flex sensor and servo motors. We shared a lot of the coding workload so it’s hard to be definitive but if we really had to, it would be something like:

Bryan – LEDs

Brendan – Ultrasonic sensors

Me – Servo motors

Challenges faced in the form of advice for future programming students:

 

#1     Do not go shopping at Sim Lim Tower on a Sunday.

#2     Go to Continental Electronics Pte Ltd #B1-23/24/25 to get WS2811 LED strips which are programmable by Arduino. Those lights are pricey though, 1m for $18 but do it for the project!

#3     If you do not take IM 1 and are deprived of your free Arduino kit, do get wires. Lots of them. Get the male to female connectors too.

#4     Nope, you can’t laser cut glass. Only acrylic mirrors from Artfriend (one costs $26)!

#5     Example codes and libraries are your best friends! We tried coding the running light pattern by ourselves one evening for around 3 hours but still couldn’t figure it out but then I found an example code and it solved like 80% of our problems. Just trust open-source culture.

#6     Yes we have flex sensors that can be borrowed from the film store. If you get the one soldered down you need male to female connectors.

#7     Loose wires were a huge problem for us, we had yet to try hot glue but it’s worth the try! Getting longer wires would probably have helped!

#8     The fabric of the black flag borrowed from the film store is way too tough. We just used Bryan’s old shirt. (We really wanted to use a stretchy material like Spandex initially but that’s too expensive)

 

Future Developments:

This installation may be small (because we’re on a low budget) but imagine being in a room with a massive infinity mirror where you can change its lighting using gestures! When you raise your hand in, motors move the other side of the room! T r i p p y

On the day of presentation we didn’t include music, but when we set it up the day after in its proper orientation and played music, it really gave the installation the atmosphere it needed!! Really important element for immersion.

Also do give a proper preface to your viewers about your installation! A well-conveyed context isn’t only fluff!!! It gives the installation more meaning and affects the way the participant views the artwork!

It is probably worth the try to place the ultrasonic sensor behind the thin piece of fabric and propped up by some piece of foam instead of placing it directly at the end of the tube since it was easily accessible by the participants and they could have just pulled it out.

P.S.: I just named a picture of the LEDs “strang” + “led” but I realised it literally spells “strangled” oh god

 

PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN:

 

By default, the LED lights are a combination of warm hues. The light gradient is also rotating at a quick and steady pace.
As the participant’s hand reaches deeper into the tube, the distance sensed by the ultrasonic sensor decreases and this changes the hues of the light to cooler hues and slows down the pace of the light rotation.
When the participant’s hand reaches all the way to the end of the tube, the lights change completely to a bluish hue with purple light rotating.

 

Here is a video of a demonstration done by our participant Jacob in the video below!

As the participant’s hand reaches the end of the tube to touch the cloth material at the end of it, they can push even further to bend the flex sensor. This changes the resistance read by the sensor and thus triggers the 3 servo motors coded for in the same program.

Experimental Fashun

 

– The Premise –  

———-

|| Using the social broadcasting platform of Facebook live, my group decided to do an interactive project called ‘Experimental Fashun’ (‘Fashion’ stylised as ‘Fashun’). We split our group of four into pairs whereby one person will be the ‘interviewer’ and the other will the ‘model’. The model’s homework is to select 5 pieces of apparel for a number of sections, namely: tops, bottoms, dresses, accessories and shoes. She will then write down a vague adjective describing the clothing. The ‘interviewer’ will have to engage and collect responses from members of the public from different parts of Singapore to participate in our project. The audience member will have to help the ‘model’ to select pieces of clothing to form their own unique combination. Since the descriptors are rather vague, it mirrors the unpredictable quality of online shopping, whereby we trust frequently vague descriptors and pick from cheap websites like Lazada or Ezbuy. From the selected combinations, we will then photograph proper photos of the whole outfits, pair them in categories of the stereotypes of the different parts of Singapore, and post them on Instagram and add the #experimentalfashun so that users of Instagram can vote for their favourite combinations.

 

Link to video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dscw9ljl2ncnhpk/main_FINAL.mp4?dl=0

 

 

For this project, our interviewers Bala and Felicia headed down to the following places respectively:

Bala – Sim Lim Square, Bugis Street

Felicia: Bras Basah Shopping Complex, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Lasalle College of the Arts

while Farzana and I were the models camping at home. We waited prepared sets of clothings to show the strangers that were interviewed what they looked like. After the outfits were chosen, we had to take pictures of the full outfit for the Instagram feed.

 

– Wardrobe Selections –

———-

Tops: cat, skeleton, checkered, tea, floral

Outerwear: thin (black), hipster weeb(the purple one), woolen, mint,thick
Dresses: checkered, CNY, pleated, floral, zebra
Accessories: Soft toy, ukelele, cap, beanie, glasses
Bottoms: navy (skirt), oriental, striped, PJs, oriental

 

– The Experience –

———-

During the execution of the Facebook live with Bala, I initially tried to make the clothing in the list as crazy as possible so that the participants would have some pretty crazy descriptors to choose from. However, what we didn’t expect is for them to take the task so seriously! A lot of them were really squinting at the descriptors, trying to clarify and asking for more details so that they could make the most suitable outfit to go for an actual party. This was a lot more significant at Bugis Street where there more more fashionable young people hanging around on a Sunday evening.

“What’s ‘tea’?”

Also, we initially intended to put on the outfit immediately after the participant had chosen the outfit, but after we interviewed the first person in Sim Lim Square, we had an awkward moment where the person had to wait for me to change, which probably took about 2 minutes, but there was still a certain social tension that existed even over the Third Space, which was really interesting to observe.

Bala was frantically trying to occupy the stranger while temporarily went off-screen to change.

This project was influenced by Blast Theory’s principles of integrating the physical and virtual world together through the use of new technology and inviting audience participation that would influence the outcome of the project, with an element of an immersive narrative. In our project, we set our premise as a fashion showdown modelled after RuPaul’s Drag Race or Project Runway, but incorporating digital elements! Not only did we empower the random participants to be designers themselves, we also involved the Instagram public to pick their favourite outfit to win the fashion show by posting polls

Our Instagram feed!

Experimental Fashun was influenced by the concepts of the dynamics of social interaction over the Third Space through social broadcasting, DIWO, and Digital Identity.

Inspired by our Telestroll project, we utilised the medium of Facebook Live to carry out an interview-style social broadcast with members of the public. We explored the concept of DIWO by getting them to make our fashion decisions for us. This links to how we allow others to alter our Digital Identity as well, since clothes are probably the most representative subject of appearance, or how you present yourself to others. Personally, I felt like this project really got me out of my comfort zone as well because I usually do not post a lot of Outfit-of-the-day (OOTD) posts on Instagram or Facebook since I’m not really into fashion myself, and my usual style is super stay-home casual.

By putting on wacky outfits and posting them onto our public Instagram page, I felt like I was allowing my digital image to be altered, and it probably is easier to believe that I’m comfortable putting on weird clothing while I was actually really kind of anxious at the thought of wearing them out in public, especially when we had to shoot the photos of the OOTDs, but I thought that after this experience, I’ve gotten pretty numb to any judgement.

Interestingly enough, we also unintentionally experienced the glitches in human behaviour and technology that we learned would eventually surface when we trapped ourselves in the Third Space for long enough, through the works of Annie Abrahams. The main point is that things would never go the way we intended for them to, for example, with that long awkward waiting time I mentioned above, as well as moments when connection was bad as we moved to different locations so it impaired the communication of the interviewer and model during the Facebook live. In the aspect of human-technology relationships, we also explored the mismatch in expectations in online shopping where you might put your trust in a supplier who you have never bought before, purely based on the pictures and descriptions that they provide, and so the products that you purchase may not end up as what you expected, since you never once inspected the product physically beforehand.

 

Online shopping websites such as Ezbuy, Lazada and Wish often offer cheap clothing with clickbait product names (just look at the amount of adjectives in there). We don’t ever know if they actually will fit us, we just see if they look good on the models, and have our perceptions swayed by reviews by other people.

 

 

In conclusion, a lot of negotiation was needed to overcome issues, from the conceiving of the idea, to the execution of it, to dealing with unintended glitches. Our outcome for the project also divulged interesting results; we found out that the older demographic preferred brighter colours compared to the younger demographic, and that people in different parts of Singapore had different attitudes towards fashion. We had involved others into our project, be it as a designer who came up with all the wacky combinations, or fashion director who got to say ‘ay’ or ‘nay’ to the outfits, and successfully executed our online fashion project, Experimental Fashun!

 

 

 

 

  • Summarize by stating how your final project explored the idea of the social and how you designed an interactive experience that included both artist and viewers.

 

@youthfulyue

For my 1 minute video selfie, I decided to do one of those Take On Me video memes with the icon head turn at the start. The original music video by a-ha depicted two settings, one being real life and one being an sketchy, illustrated fictional setting. By applying this outline filter, I wanted to show that I like to be projected as an imaginary goofy persona online which I may not reflect upon first impression in real life.

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

Parodies:

 

I compounded another meme on top of it by intentionally playing the recorder horribly.

By using memes as a theme of popular culture, I am able to portray my own sense of humour that shapes my art style through this video, in the sense that I do not really adopt a neat, stylistic style of design, but rather one that is just ever so slightly self-derogatory and relatable to other people.

Also, I filmed this video right in front of the lift of my floor, the space right outside my house which is my space of comfort but yet not in a public space. This shows how I’m not really comfortable with completely exposing my weird side publicly, but I like to slightly step out of my comfort zone and take things slowly.

 

P.S.: I was intending to do some sort of a dance cover but then I realised I have no dancing skills… I guess I’m still not too ready to embrace my ‘sloppy’ side on the internet………….

Welcome to my Digital Crib!

 

My desktop is as cluttered as my brain is. (so is my room)

 

I have a lot of junk files and applications that I don’t even frequently use stored on the left of my screen. It’s like an organised mess, you know?

 

My to-do list are always open in my notes.

 

Youtube is ALWAYS on for music.

 

Facebook is always there for distraction and there are various tabs open for school.

 

The background is from one of the only few computer games I own called Life is Strange and I really love the game :DDD

Is this burning an ETERNAL FRAME?

|| The Eternal Frame (1975) is a videotaped reenactment of the assassinated of John F. Kennedy’s assassination by Antfarm which seeks to draw attention to the power of the mediated image.

 

Antfarm is a collective of radical artists founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (1943-2003) that sought to rebel against the conformative style of art in their time and build a community of artists that vigorously experimented with new forms of art.[1]

 

http://kadist.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ant-farm-eternal-flame-2.jpg

 

In an Interview with Chip Lord by Randall Packer over the Third Space Network stream, Chip Lord mentions that John F. Kennedy’s death was the first televised American tragedy ever, and Eternal Frame sought to explore the power of the media to immortalise such a historical moment and ingrain it into the minds of people by converting a real-life event into a processed memory via the media. [2]

 

 

In another interview about The Eternal Frame hosted by Constance Lewallen (2012), Doug Halls states that he resonates with Jean Jacque-Rousseau’s view that something cannot be true until it’s fictionalised, and the interpretation of a memory aberrates as it is constantly reappropriated throughout time, which is possible if an event is immortalised in a digital form. [3]

 

” I think that idea of you kind of grasping to it and extricated into your time, then in the act of doing that, certain truths disappear but other ones begin to emerge.”

– Doug Halls

 

 

Taking the achievements of past post-modern art movements like Constructivism and Futurism to a greater level, Antfarm’s fearless venture into different media and experimenting with different spatial contexts allowed them to successfully added new layers of meanings in their artworks that allowed them to make political and social statements.

 

 

Resources:

[1] Constance Lewallen, Still Subversive After all These Years

[2] Interview with Chip Lord: https://vimeo.com/257224713

[3] The Eternal Frame, hosted by Constance Lewallen: https://vimeo.com/53734504

Everytime We Touch, I Get This Feeling.

|| This week during class, we all got on Adobe Connect (it was my first time using this software ever), and immersed ourselves into the Third Space together.

 

We discussed about how the emotional bandwidth (the quality of emotional exchange between two individuals) of texting is significantly different from that of video calling or social broadcasting since we are able to view the voice and expression of the other party to fully gauge their responses, compared to simply communicating via words.

 

This experience was very new to me since previously we only broadcasted live together as a class but did not really attempt to make any interactions across screens (although this was attempted in the Telestroll microproject). As a class, we were present in both our local space (the first space), and the digitalised platform of Adobe Connect (the third space). Since we were all in the classroom, our remote spaces (second spaces) were all the same relative to each other. It was not possible to see everyone in the room at once in the physical world, but Adobe Connect sure made it much easier. It was also super cool to see how although we were in the same room at different positions, our minds were all in the same place.

 

We attempted to accomplish various collective tasks together, such as putting our fingers together with a partner beside us (not physically but onscreen), putting our faces really close to the camera and making a cross across the screen.

E.T. touch with our fellow classmates beside us on Adobe Connect. Photo credits: Randall Packer
Pen Alignment. Photo credits: Randall Packer
Onscreen Cross. Photo credits: Randall Packer

For these tasks to be completed successfully, it was vital that we negotiated and compromised to achieve our goal. From the simplest initial task of getting a pen out, to aligning the positions/scale of our objects/hands, every part of the job required some form of give-and-take. Even with the Onscreen Cross, if we were not involved in making the actual cross with our arm, we needed to know our job and do it, even if it meant doing absolutely nothing with our arm, lest there be an extra stroke coming out of the cross.

 

While we see negotiation on a smaller scale here in a onscreen microproject, these skills are definitely applicable to real life whenever we need to communicate with others and get our ideas through in order to get a job done successfully.