Daniel Carlsten

Let’s begin with the early part of your career, not least because I think it’s interesting that you went to advertising school rather than attending a formal graphic design program. And soon after, in 2004, you joined Acne, which, at the time, described itself as a “creative collective” and was applying its talents in a wide range of disciplines, not least through the fashion brand ACNE STUDIOS.

When you arrived, did you feel like advertising school had set you up well to thrive in that kind of environment?

The school was for both advertising and design and I was in the Art Direction class. We did advertising campaigns, but also conceptual stuff, identity projects, even illustration work. I think it set us up well, but, importantly, my best friend in the class, JONAS JANSSON, was someone I loved working with. We did everything together, and by the time we were ready to graduate we saw that people in the years above us were struggling to get work. So we thought, “OK, let’s just set up our own studio. We aren’t even going to go out with our portfolios.” So we started freelancing a bit, even before graduating. One of the teachers at school had a connection to Acne. She liked us and said, “You should go talk to Mats because he needs some help.”

So we met him, and met a few others; this was when Acne had about thirty-five people, and was still a relatively small company. I remember JONNY JOHANSSON, of what would later become Acne Studios, sitting on the floor between desks with his small team of designers because there weren't enough desks to accommodate everyone.

Anyway, Jonas and I obviously never had budgets to work with in school, so we were used to doing everything ourselves.

If we made a music video for someone, we’d film it and edit it. Whenever we needed a picture, we’d take a photo. I guess this goes for most students. But it was a good fit at Acne, because it was a workplace where the disciplines were sort of mixed up and you’d be working on very different projects one day to the next. And the company structure was very flat, with no clear hierarchies, which meant that we were tasked with client-facing projects from day one. For better or worse, we met the clients, did presentations, and completed the work. In some sense, I regard my time at Acne as being like a master’s degree—a continuous education for five years, but with real projects that went out into the world.

Was there something about Stockholm’s creative community in the mid-1990s and early 2000s that allowed a company like Acne to be so “anarchic” and to give you the kinds of opportunities it did? It was a thirty-five person company, after all, so you’d think there might be more hierarchy or structure.

It’s a good question. I think Acne was part of a broader scene that was pushing the boundaries of not only indie fashion labels and creative agencies but also of pop culture. There was a trend in the ’90s of little being taken seriously. We had ZTV—which was like a low-budget Swedish MTV—which aired a lot of music videos and odd, ironic, niche programs, which I think made TV and media cool for young people that in turn wanted to create their own stuff. Simultaneously there was a boom of web agencies and digital design studios with very young people building very successful companies. I think, in that context, hierarchy went out the window.

You were at Acne for about five years, before going independent in 2009. Can you tell me a bit more about that decision? I ask not least because I, too, had quit a job that year and remember being worried about the global economic downturn. You made a risky choice …

Or I’d quit and begin working for myself—taking a risk, but building something for me. It became an easy choice. I haven’t regretted it once.

There were a few things that led to me quitting. The small-scale family culture that had attracted me to the company in the first place kind of evaporated as the company grew. I had been there for five years and I was curious about other possibilities. I hadn’t freelanced and wanted to try it, to see where it would take me. Also, I felt like I got more and more responsibility within Acne, yet I didn’t have the support I needed to do good work and I wasn’t a partner. I just had my paycheck.

To make a long story short, I found myself at a crossroads. Either I’d stay at Acne, building up the Acne Art Department, with all the work that would go into that, only so that the owners could make a better profit. Or I’d quit and begin working for myself—taking a risk, but building something for me. It became an easy choice. I haven’t regretted it once.

Let’s talk a little bit more about work, and about your design perspective. One thing you seem to do is to employ an economy of means to maximize a project’s impact—you keep the gestures as simple as possible. I found it funny, then, that this translates to your tastes in reading. In an earlier interview you cited YOKO ONO and JENNY HOLZER as being among your favorite writers. I see both of them working kind of like art directors: Ono gives instructions to her audience, with lots of room to interpret them; Holzer makes cryptic pronouncements that have little specificity but great emotional weight.

You’re absolutely right. There’s an aspect of minimalism that speaks to me. Looking at something, seeing its core qualities, and enhancing just those. When done right, those things have an effortless quality, because they’re not made up.

At the same time, there’s something in pop art that speaks to me—its directness, its boldness, how it connects to the broader culture with humor and warmth.

Both Holzer and Ono have humor in their work. Holzer is darker, for sure, but there’s a punch to her work that is pure Pop to me. When you take that punch and place it side-by-side with something serene or calm, something happens. It’s a clash of two very pure energies that makes an effortless punch. What ties my work together is the search for that clash.

You’re making reference to an earlier generation of visual artists, of movements that emerged primarily from the United States but were embraced readily in Europe. Germans latched onto minimalist artists, through venues like KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE in Dusseldorf. But it was the Swedes, led by PONTUS HULTÉN AT MODERNA MUSEET, who brought all the pop artists over and did mind-bending exhibitions.

Not to make you generalize too much, but is there something about Swedish culture that lends itself more to the pop end of that spectrum, while still holding on to some of this economy of means we were talking about?

Maybe there is a general Swedish liking for things that appeal to the many? It could come from a history of welfare politics, the idea that if we share things, it makes our society stronger. I don’t know, it might just be a correlation. But Pop is mass communication. It’s inviting. It’s for everyone.

Speaking for myself, I find minimalism a bit melancholic. It doesn’t want to communicate, it just wants to be. Like meditation, it requires some practice to fully appreciate, which makes it a bit … excluding.

I like my work to have a commercial value. I want to communicate with people, I want things to feel inviting and inclusive. You can have that and still be elegant. That’s where Pop comes in.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a magician, an illusionist—to stand on a stage. Only I was too shy. Later on, design became my stage. It fits me well, because the attention is not on me, but on the work.

You sent me some in-progress writing and I couldn’t help but notice that the only designers you cite by name are MASSIMO VIGNELLI, PAUL RAND, MICHAEL BIERUT, and JOSEF MÜLLER-BROCKMANN. That’s a coherent list of people who take a rigorous, craft-based approach yet work on very commercial projects.

I’m not a designer, but I presume that to marry those two things and achieve commercial success you need a certain kind of warmth or humanity in the work.

Yes, definitely. But more so, they’re very quotable, because they lecture and write essays. Not many designers do that. I wish more did, because it would give us a more diverse group of people to quote and learn from. There are a lot of introverts in our field, including myself, and many of us have found this work enchanting for the very reason that it doesn’t require speaking to an audience or writing a book. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a magician, an illusionist—to stand on a stage. Only I was too shy. Later on, design became my stage. It fits me well, because the attention is not on me, but on the work.

Another way to get at coherence, or consistency, arose in another statement of yours I read. You talk about having to feel good while doing the work, even if that means doing something similar over and over again. There’s a tension in design industries between people who want to have, or maybe default to, an identifiable style and those always trying to push, to do something different, to not get trapped. Can you talk about where you’ve landed on that spectrum? What does it mean to say, “If I’m doing the same thing over and over again, it’s fine, so long as I’m feeling good”?

Over the years, I have become less interested in the inventive part of design and more energized by the craft.
In my twenties I looked with envy at people like Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli, and HENRIK NYGREN. I loved the vertical approach to their work. The idea of digging deeper and deeper into something, getting better and better at it, to the point where people start asking you for your perspective. Obviously it’s not about making the same thing over and over again, but making decisions based on a personal view. Even M/M (PARIS) have an extreme coherence throughout their work that I really appreciate. Now, in my forties, with fifteen years spent working for myself, I seem to have dug out a hole of my own, and clients come to get my perspective.

This is a natural transition to discussing a few projects, but I also want to ask: when did you begin to trust your intuition? When did you begin believing your perspective is valid and could be something that sustains a creative business, a creative life?

I’ve always been picky about which projects to accept. It used to be that I questioned whether I could handle a project, whether it may be too big. Whereas more recently—and maybe this comes with age, or experience—I’m asking, “What people are involved? Do they seem like good-minded people who have their stuff together?” Another thing that comes from having been to many, many meetings is that I get better and better at scanning a room. There’s an energy that comes from the people sitting there. If the energy is off, usually the project is off, too, and so I decline. Good projects come from good energy and I only want to be involved with good projects.

That connects back to feeling good at work every day. It has a lot to do with people I work with. At the end of the day, my studio is just me. I don’t have assistants. I don’t have a manager, except for my illustration agent. So I have to connect with the client because they become a creative partner. If I get that connection in the first meeting, then everything else comes naturally: being honest, speaking my mind about things that work and don’t work, things I like and don’t like.

I want to return to the question about relationships in a few minutes. But I’d love to turn to the NITTY GRITTY project from the middle of the last decade. What did that brand look like before, or was it one you built from scratch?

The company has been around since the ’90s, and has gone through a series of transformations along the way. But it’s always been a nicely curated shop—first men, now women, too. But right before the identity you see on my website, they had another identity that I had also made. So I got to remake my own work, which is rare. I’ve never done that before, and it was such a privilege.

Years ago they contacted me because we had some mutual friends. They wanted a refresh and I did that. It landed nicely and was a good project. But you know how sometimes you watch a project you’ve sent out into the world and you think, “If only I had done this, or had time to do that”? You learn from the work you did, and from seeing it out in the world, but then the money is spent and the contract is up.

Well, they called again a few years later because they were celebrating a big anniversary and asked, “Would you do a logo for the anniversary?” And in conversation, we mutually decided that maybe it was time to touch up the identity, too—just polish it a little. It was the pandemic, their online sales were booming, so they had some money to invest in the brand. So we made everything from scratch again.

I’m even more tantalized because there are no images on your site of what it was like before you began “version two.” Was it a 180° turn, or more like an evolution?

It was an evolution. But I had felt that, the first time, what we ended up with was a little too over-branded. I had stripped away some of the 1990s-era ironic appropriation of a heritage British crest, but had still worked with a kind of antique type. The second time through I wanted to get rid of even that. I was inspired by ANDREAS MURKUDIS’ shop in Berlin. I wanted to push Nitty Gritty a bit more in that direction—not all the way, but part of the way. I wanted the brand to be more technical, which also would bring it in line with the kinds of clothes they were selling.

You’ve also written that whenever you design something, you cater to the expected first, but then make room for unexpected details. I’d say the unexpected here are the materials: kraft-paper bags, luxury tags and ribbons, four-way rubber bands. Can you talk about some of those decisions?

To me, the brown kraft paper relates to all the wood in the stores themselves; it’s a material translation. The same is true of the white boxes and the stores’ white walls. I have this idea of packaging being a kind of souvenir from the shop, like you can take a little piece of the shop with you.

But also, using these basic materials and only one typeface creates a stage where you can put other, faster, more-expressive stuff on top. Like someone who wears a white shirt and dark slacks but then does interesting stuff with accessories. So the brown and white are expected, they’re a no-brainer. The company’s ’90s-era heritage crest had orange in it, so I connected back to that with accents, like the ribbon. The store has a lot of international sales, generous little giveaways, and events in the shops, so I helped them create fly tags and postcards and other stuff to go with those events. It was a way to let the identity breathe over time. Even though it’s so basic, over time it becomes quite massive, it shoots off in different directions.

I’d love to talk, too, about the Sabelli-Frisch winery identity. You’ve written about how you like identities that conform to stereotypes, but with a twist. I feel like the Nitty Gritty tags are a twist. What are the unexpected details that bring Sabelli-Frisch to life? Wine branding, and bottle-label design, are very constrained …

Well, you don’t pour wine into just any bottle—a Riesling goes into a Riesling bottle, for instance—so that takes care of the “stereotypical” part. The bottle is what it is. So what I had to play with was the closure and the paper label. Adam, the client, produces low-intervention wines, and he wanted that to guide the work I did. As part of a trend to lower the bar to entry into wine, a lot of brand work has gone DIY, more art-school, kinda doodle-y. He wanted something a little more refined, so long as it didn’t look like a typical Napa product.

So he didn’t want a simple illustration of a hilly landscape …

Exactly. He’s also a fellow Swede, so he wanted a little bit of Scandinavia in it, something modern. So I settled on a wax top, which hints at exclusivity, but by giving it an unexpected color, it changes the impression it gives off. Adam said, “I like blue.” So we found a blue. Sometimes it’s that simple. As for the blind embossing, it was a way for me to work with a big logo that still felt calm and quiet. I like layering type, so the black info is printed and then we emboss the logo over it. Over time we have played with different colors for different series, and also switched back and forth between blue top with a white label and a white top with a blue label and so forth, stretching this very tight framework of assets in as many ways we can come up with.

The wax enclosure also references wax seals, which gives it a kind of personalization—it reminds you that despite the generic, law firm–like name, it’s one person behind the winery, and receiving a bottle is like receiving a letter.

Exactly. At the outset, Adam was actually dipping each bottle himself.

Anyway, it’s been interesting to see how you can bend the rules within a market category. There have been so many approaches to wine, but there remain huge gaps in both design and approaches to communication. It is humbling and exciting to learn about wine and the wine industry, about people’s expectations and desires.

The way you describe it makes it sound like another identity that will evolve over time. These are not projects that you hand over and walk away from, which hints, again, at the deeper relationships you have with your clients.

I want to discuss one more project, the RESTAURANT SOLEN, which seems like it’s one of your most recent—and perhaps one where you are most closely involved. How early on were you involved in the process?

Oh, very early on. Adam and Albin, the owners, were offered this huge, abandoned industrial butcher’s facility and they asked me and the architects to come look at it.

They had an idea of a restaurant that would mix Italy, the Middle East, California, and Mexico. They were joking about the “food of the sun,” because there used to be this cheesy Swedish TV show of that name.

We went through a naming process with hundreds of options, but then we just said: “What if we just call it Solen?” which is Swedish for sun. As in, “Let’s go to the sun.” Every Swede can sort of relate to that, as a dreamy escape. It sounds simple and corny, and it offered a nice framework, especially for the design.

It’s a nice, tight framework, but again you expand upon it—you twist it. There’s the menu, there’s the coasters, maybe a neon sign … all the stuff you think of for a restaurant identity. But you’ve created a cut-paper mobile that hangs from the ceiling, designed some hand-cut mirrors, and done all sorts of things that go beyond the typical remit for “branding a restaurant.”

Yes, definitely. I really used my full toolbox, so to speak. Illustration, graphic design, art direction.

I get that Solen is one of the most robust projects you’ve worked on, but I couldn’t help but notice it embodies something of a trend I saw in your work. Your early projects use classic typefaces: Futura, Avant Garde, Century Gothic. In an essay you shared with me, you mentioned always turning first to one of FOUR WORKHORSES: Futura, Helvetica, Times, Courier.
But Solen uses RAUSCHEN B (OUT OF THE DARK), which has a very different feeling and is from a much smaller type foundry. Can you talk about the permission you gave yourself to make such a choice, and whether you could’ve done so a decade ago?

As I mentioned, the restaurant is in an industrial building, and in renovating it we left some of that roughness intact. I thought it’d be nice to work some of that into the brand, but I’m very hesitant to use distressed typefaces—they always look fake.

DAVID CARSON isn’t on your inspiration list.

He was an influence in my teens, but he wasn’t on the Solen moodboard, no.

I wanted the quality of letterpress printing; an analog, industrial feel. But menus need to be reprinted all the time, so actual letterpress wasn’t an option. Rauschen, with its rounded inner corners, was just spot on. It has this sense of bleeding into the paper without making too much fuss about it.

In regards to permission, yeah, I guess there was a sense of “Is this ok?” “Can I do this?” “Will it look fake?” “What does this say about me?” But I liked the way it looked, and that was all that mattered.

Ten years ago I might have been more hesitant. I guess I am more confident now. It’s like with cooking: no matter what ingredients I use, it will always taste like “my” food. It’s inevitable.

Yeah, at body-copy size it still kind of passes for rigorous, but if you look closely you can see the idiosyncrasies.

Exactly.

We’ve talked primarily about your design work, but you’re also an in-demand illustrator. And I couldn’t help but notice how bold the yellow is that you’ve used throughout the Solen identity—it’s not the kind of color you’d add to a neutral, “designy” palette. Is that yellow somehow part of your illustrator’s side coming through?

Whatever comes out of the printer is fine as long as it communicates yellow.

Yes, working as an illustrator makes me more apt to bring color to identity work. Regarding this yellow for Solen, it’s not so much about a specific shade, but rather a general idea of yellow. Looking through the touch points you’ll see a warm yellow here, and a brighter yellow there. Whatever comes out of the printer is fine as long as it communicates yellow.

I had said earlier I wanted to return to relationships. You’ve done several projects for certain clients. You’ve done a project for an architect and then for his partner, who is a floral designer. In looking at your portfolio, I come away with a sense of a community of about twelve or fifteen people in your orbit, people you work with really well, long-term creative partners. What unifies these people, in your mind?

I’m drawn to people who are experts in their fields but still enthusiastic and humble. People who remain excited about their work even years into doing it. And who are curious about my thoughts on it.