Web & graphic designer. Twenty years of practice. Currently stable, but a relapse into some new hyperfixation is always pending.
I''m Steffen Wold, a web and graphic designer working out of Lillehammer, Norway. Twenty years in, my process hasn''t changed much: something catches my attention, I fall into it for a few weeks longer than is reasonable, and somewhere in there a design concept falls out. This site is the record of those episodes — partly a portfolio, partly a lab notebook.
Most of my paid work is branding, interface design, and print, but the case files in the journal are almost always self-initiated — the stuff I design because I can''t stop thinking about it, not because a client asked. If any of it resonates with a real brief you''re holding, that''s what the contact details below are for.
A short, incomplete history of things I couldn''t stop thinking about long enough to design something.
A three-week hang-up on why pill packaging looks the way it does — and what happens when you design a blister pack for information instead of medicine.
A field study of the button-and-coin interfaces that predate the touchscreen — and a concept for a machine that still uses them on purpose.
Two months deep in analog synthesizer panels, ending in a UI concept for a synth that only exists as a set of screens.
What a brand looks like when its entire job is to keep someone calm for twenty unplanned minutes.
Designing letterforms for OCR and barcode systems, where the reader has no taste and no patience for elegance.
A full identity and decal system for a fictional arcade cabinet, because the marquee art is the best part of any arcade and nobody tells you that.