We have been huge fans of Amsterdam based designer Simon Riisnæs Dagfinrud's work for quite some time now, so it was only natural for us to invite him to create a template for Read.cv Sites. Today Simon is sharing his wonderfully brutal template named after his hometown in Norway, Ørsta. We also took this as a chance to ask him some questions about his background, multidisciplinary design practice, and opening a physical studio space in Amsterdam-Noord.
Hey Simon! Where in the world are you writing us from right now?
Hei! As I’m typing this I’m sitting in my new studio in Amsterdam, which my partner and I opened just a few weeks back. Amsterdam’s been my home for the past four years, having moved here from Oslo and my hometown in Western Norway.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you first got into design?
I’ve very much been into “creating things” for as long as I can remember, so my path into design probably started with trying to invent some sort of gadget using stuff I’d find around the house as a kid.
As I got older I eventually got my hands on software like Photoshop and GeoCities, and (as I’m writing this I’m realizing) in a sort of boring way, I never looked back.
Getting a bit closer to current day, I very prematurely started my own little agency along with some friends when I’d just turned 18, after having done some design jobs here and there. In hindsight I think this offered a lot of great experiences both on the creative side and the business side. Since then I’ve been jumping back and forth between disciplines before I finally landed on a more combined designer-developer role at WeTransfer. About a year ago I quit my job there and started running my own little studio, noko!
Your practice spans many different design disciplines — graphic, interaction, brand, product, data viz, motion — and seems to seamlessly fuse them together in a way that feels both brand new yet coherent and pragmatic. How do you think about these different disciplines when it comes to your work, and is making a distinction between these practices important?
First of all – thank you!!
My work definitely tends to span multiple disciplines – I think partly because I’m probably just naturally curious and find all of them interesting, and partly because I do actively try to venture outside of my natural habitat(s).
Without getting overly philosophical, I think there’s something inherently childish and exploratory about creativity: if you only ever color inside the boxes, you’ll only make boring stuff, sort of. Like painters breaking the rules of perspective or composition, there’s something cool about knowing digital conventions and when to break them, or getting design rationale from somewhere else entirely.
For me, making distinctions between disciplines is more about logistics. Master of many trades, jack of some. Putting people in boxes (or departments) would be more helpful if it didn’t also make people assume you can’t do two (highly related) things at once.
On your studio website you write “the design & tech industry is mostly completely ignorant of its impact on language and culture, and has been for too long. noko is a response to this.” Can you expand on your personal experience with this and how it motivated you to start a studio practice?
Very attentive questions, I love it! There’s a few bits to cover and I know I can go on and on about this subject, so I’ll try my best to keep this one short.
Essentially, I think culture might be the most basic natural occurrence of ‘identity’, and language is a sort of concretized part of it – spoken and written, but also visual and coded. After all, it’s all about systems for communication. Often with very similar syntax, just in different forms. There’s this (slightly cliché) quote that “a language is a dialect with an army” which I really love because it very succinctly points out culture’s role in seemingly important distinctions we establish, and then take for granted. Language shapes thought.
As for my personal connection to it, there’s this whole language situation back home in Norway where I’m a minority language user which definitely makes me more interested in language in general. Or more likely to spot when something’s off – like when a seemingly local brand uses a language that literally just doesn’t represent (or effectively reaches) its target audience. Or the other way around, when a bigger brand appropriates local culture.
After coming into the design industry and having observed it for a couple of years, that noko ‘manifest’ rant on the website was more or less just my natural reaction after seeing yet another bad example.
The industry carries a lot of the responsibility in getting these things right, but unfortunately really lacks focus on culture and language during the design process. And on the consequences thereof on people it designs stuff for. Generally leading to worse design, and sometimes even being directly harmful.
Didn’t quite succeed in keeping it short, but – with all this in mind I started noko with the aim of doing things a bit differently. Nowadays I feel like the studio is less centred on this in some projects, but it’s still at the heart of what I’m trying to do with noko. The design process starts with language.
You recently opened a physical studio space in Amsterdam-Noord that looks amazing. Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced opening a physical space, and what your aspirations are for the space moving forward?
I did! I felt like I needed a space with potential for exploring more, so I left the shared space I was working from in the city centre and then my partner and I started looking for options a bit closer to where we live (in Noord). Dubbed noko.space because I love a good, concrete domain!
It’s definitely been a bit of a journey – from getting the keys in the first place, to finally being able to take on the real challenge of turning it into a lovely workspace. Literally not even the electricity worked when we got here, so there were some real hurdles. It’s all been very rewarding though and (in the spirit of blending disciplines) fun to work with a very different format and output than I’m used to.
Moving forward we’re trying to avoid over-designing things, so we’re intentionally taking it a bit slow and seeing where that gets us. We’ve opened the space for a few collaborators to come and work with us, and it’s already a really nice, creative sphere. The aspiration overall is to make a very functional space with lots of tools for exploring creativity across formats, so we’ve already got a pen plotter and heat press in place. More to come!
I love the Ørsta template you created for Read.cv. Can you tell us a bit about the template (maybe design process or who it’s for), and maybe some ideas that had to get thrown out while working on it?
I figured I’d follow the location-based naming of templates, so I tried to let my hometown inspire me. Turns out that means a pretty brutal, but very colorful layout. Besides, there’s no better color combination than orange and green, right? :—)
Creating a template like this is a pretty intriguing brief – there’s a set of very defined constraints, like using the Read.cv profile data, but otherwise it’s completely open. So to me it introduces the question of how people could navigate and explore that content.
I explored a few ideas that were more abstract, visually, like shoving all the content into one viewport and putting a sort of sitemap at the bottom where you’d, like, hover “Work Experience” and it’d draw literal lines to work experience items on the screen, or highlight them in some way.
Eventually though I found it most compelling to zoom in on the profile structure and hierarchy, so I ended up making a nav-meets-map that dynamically resizes based on what’s currently on the screen, and really categorizing the profile content with some sticky scroll.
I love letting the typography do most of the work, because it allows the site to take on all these different shapes based on the content without much noise. So I went with this quite brutal layout where the hovered sections are highlighted instead of adding much space between them.
It was a really fun one. Thanks for having me!!
What advice would you have for younger designers who want to create the type of work that you do?
I think I’d have to highlight the value of jumping into things without the required experience, haha. A pretty full-on “easier said than done” type of advice, but the person ending up with the job is often not the most qualified. So if worst case that’s me every now and then, then that seems fair too.
Language shapes thought – and how you think about yourself shapes what you can do. Provided you have access to a computer, you can start learning how to code, make music, create things in 3D, etc. With risk of sounding a bit self-help guru-esque, I used to think I couldn’t properly code for many years and I think it’s bizarre now that code is the medium I usually feel the most confident in.
A leaving thought: you don’t actually have to pick one discipline, you can combine them :—)
You can find Simon on Read.cv or his personal website, and install his template Ørsta here.