Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[CS6]
My name is Kjell Ekhorn.
I'm a graphic designer and an image maker.
I'm living on an island outside Oslo.
I think when I was growing up I just knew that I wanted to have
something to do with art because I loved drawing,
and I loved visual stuff.
Non-Format is myself, and it's Jon Forss.
I still can't see you.
Ah, there you are.
Cheers.<
[Jon Forss] Well, we've been working together for 7 years when I decided
that I was going to move to the US.
It was a worrying prospect.
As it turned out, technology has really allowed us to work together.
I live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I love the winters here. I love the snow.
I love the cold.
It's about extremes.
I like the extreme cold because it forces you to put on a big coat and a hat
and to make that decision, and I'd rather that there were spikes
of weirdness thrown in there somewhere, and I think it comes out in the work,
and it comes out in where I live.
Non-Format is 2 people's brains bashing together.
That's really all it is is it's just 2 people
playing around with stuff and seeing what comes out.
[Kjell Ekhorn] We met in London in the late 90s.
We started off just doing some collaborating on
some music packaging projects and some book jackets.
[Jon Forss] And as soon as we realized that what we had created together
was better than we were creating separately
that's when we knew we had a business.
That's when we knew that we were on to something.
[Kjell Ekhorn] When we first started up we got The Wire magazine,
and after 3 years of designing it we really found our own voice.
[Jon Forss] Sometimes you work on something, and you don't know whether
it's good unless somebody else points at it and says, "That's good,"
especially if it's someone you trust.
We got very used to that dynamic, so when I moved here,
when we moved apart, we had to make sure that we could
replicate that as best as we could.
Did you send something more?
Yeah, I just sent you a screen grab of this thing.
[Kjell Ekhorn] InDesign and Illustrator and Photoshop have been
our staple diet for the last 15 years or whatever.
[Jon Forss] One of the things we do, of course, is share files across the internet.
Kjell finishes his work when I get up in the morning,
and then I have the opportunity to carry on working on them
so when he wakes up in the morning it's like the little elves have been working overnight,
and there's something for him to see.
[Kjell Ekhorn] The aesthetic of Non-Format is quite minimal.
It's quite stark, and it's quite emotional.
[Jon Forss] We tend to favor black and white over color.
We like to simplify, simplify, simplify, just keep it to the
absolute core elements that you need,
real extremes of form, so we'll have something that's incredibly heavy
against something that's incredibly light, and that tends to
be a recurring theme, if there is one.
[♪ Music ♪]
[Kjell Ekhorn] We are definitely thinking about the audience
that we are communicating to, but we are also making sure
that we make something that we think is strong.
Non-Format has a bigger ego than Kjell and Jon, which is what I like.
We have a kind of--Non-Format is the ego bit.
That's the one we don't want to let down.
We don't want to let down Non-Format.
When you have this kind of honesty with each other
it creates a trust, and you know that when somebody
is arguing for or against something they really mean it.
[Jon Forss] I'd find it incredibly difficult if I couldn't work with Kjell.
We're lucky that we trust each other so much, I think,
and it's not just that we decided to trust each other.
We have built up the trust over a decade.
[Adobe]
