Mind Your Step

Amazing street illusion created by Erik Johansson. Looks like a large hole in the middle of Sergels torg public square in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Food Styling by Linda Lundgren

Cool advertising created by Swedish Food Stylist Linda Lundgren for Scandinavian supermarkets Hemköp.

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IKEA's Brilliant Facebook Campaign

Here's the story.

IKEA opened a new store in Malmo, Sweden and didn't have a lot of money to advertise about it or let people know about it. So they hired a small advertising agency called Forsman and Bodenfors to create a special launch campaign.

Now, what the agency did was that it created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. and over a period of 2 weeks, it uploaded images from IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album. Then they announced that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.

Before you knew it, word got out and thousands of Swedes were begging for more pictures so they could tag themselves a new sofa, a new bed etc. At this point, thousands of Swedes, were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around their profile pages!

Genius!

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Kaffe Packaging by Felix Lobelius

Kaffe is a coffee shop started by 4 swedes.

"The handwritten charcoal aesthetic derives from the personal connection every person has with their type of coffee. This is reflected in a direct style of communication with business cards, bags, take away cups etc. personally addressing the customer."

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IKEA Switches To Verdana, Everybody Goes Insane!

So, apparently, IKEA switched from Futura to Verdana. Why? Here's their official answer from Typophile:

"IKEA abandons 50 years of Futura and Century Schoolbook for… Verdana.
In an interview with swedish design magazine CAP&DESIGN the reason for the change is to be able to use the same font in all countries, including asian countries. Also they want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the web."

Following the change, people go crazy about the whole issue. There is a petition to "ask IKEA to get rid of Verdana" , a facebook group was also created, and everybody is complaining about it on Twitter. Even Time magazine wrote an article about it.

Take a chill pill guys. Its not that big a deal! I think there are more important issue to worry about!!!!

So Fadi, hows the situation there in sweden, home of the retailer giant?

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Nordic Rock Ice Cubes

Nordic Rock is mined from ancient Swedish pollution-free base rock. It is the purest way of cooling your drink - literally 'on the rocks'. Stone does not melt, which means no unclean water in your glass. They are also reusable making them very eco-friendly.


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