Age: 27
Graphic Designer
From: Malmø, Sweden
Lives in: Copenhagen
Website: www.casperheijkenskjold.com

Despite the delay, a mutual appreciation developed during Heijkenskjöld’s internship. “Even though he is properly grounded in the graphic aspects of design,” Sagmeister says, “Casper feels confident and comfortable in many disciplines, resulting in seriously wonderful live-action and animated video projects as well as small and large sculptural endeavors. He has fabulous ideas and knows how to execute them well, the best thing I can say about any designer.”

Since Heijkenskjöld struck out on his own in 2010, his clients have included musicians, fashion labels and nightclubs. “I got into fashion because I love clothes,” he says, but it was love that kept him there. His girlfriend interned at the quirky Danish label Moonspoon Saloon, and while he was visiting her, he found out that they needed a Christmas card designed. He happily obliged.

Posters for the nightclub Smuts, 2010

"Anthem" music video for Black Rose, 2011

"Ceci n'est pas un plamier," 2011

Heijkenskjöld has also worked on a number of animated music videos, including a collaboration with his brother for a reggae-influenced house track called “Anthem,” by the group Black Rose. The video features a parade of illustrated animals, including an alligator, a crab, and a giraffe. “Because it had a very abstract concept, I chose to illustrate the feeling of the music rather than a concept,” he says. “I wanted to capture the joy I felt when listening to the track.”

Covers for the Finnish record label Top Billin, 2010-2011

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

The “Eames” film, which came out last month, recently debuted on PBS’s American Masters series, and can currently be viewed online on the PBS website. The DVD, which features nine extra scenes, can also be purchased from First Run Features.

What made you decide to do a documentary on the Eames?

I had a personal affinity for them, but I didn’t have a design background at all. I didn’t have hip parents who had a lot of Eames furniture in the house or anything like that. Their films have a cachet among a certain subculture of film geeks. You know, the kinds of guys who work at video stores and either live with their parents for the rest of their lives or become Quentin Tarantino. You always see their videos under “Staff Picks.” I think I was introduced to the films through a friend when I was in graduate school at Berkeley. I thought their films are very personal for how beautiful and different they are. They made me curious: What kind of people make films like this? These are not the kinds of films you’d make for commercial purposes, but they weren’t art films either.

One of the things I noticed early in the film was that you were telling not just the story of their design but also the story of their lives as designers and their creative process. How did you strike the balance between telling the story of their romance, which wasn’t always as rosy as it first might appear, and creating a truthful account?

If you’re writing a script for a romantic comedy, you get to fit it into a happy arc. But this is real life. And it wasn’t that happy in terms of their relationship at the end. I was a little bit self-conscious about that. There is so much success throughout the course of their career but towards the end of their lives you get the feeling there was a certain amount of disillusionment and disappointment in their relationship and that their marriage wasn’t what it had been. And Charles’ other relationships certainly took a toll on theirs. But on the other hand, there is also something uplifting in it. They weathered it. They loved each other very much until the very end. They came up with a very adult, mature way of living with a less than perfect relationship. Their family mattered to them and their work mattered to them and they continued to work with each until the very end.  I think they made certain sacrifices for things that really mattered to them. In the end, it’s not a romantic comedy. In the real world, that’s still a pretty good ending.

Can you talk a little bit about how you put the film together?

We had this access to all of that material, which includes 100 completed films and hundreds of thousands of photographs. We could only realistically manage to get our grubby little hands on a small fraction of it. Almost everything at the Eames Office is at the Library of Congress, but sometimes we found it easier just to get it from the Eames Office. They knew where stuff was. At the Library of Congress, it’s an important collection but it’s one of a million important collections.

One story that I love to tell is the one about how Charles’ grandson, Eames Dimitrios, goaded us into doing way more work than we had intended. He encouraged us to find the very best examples of prints of the Eames films. So we got the part where we were ready to finish the film, and we had acquired prints of films like “Powers of Ten” and “Tops.” We had done transfers off of 16 mm prints that were held in various archives. For most documentaries done for PBS, these would have been fantastic prints. Typically for documentary film, you’re just happy to be able to get your hands on something that is relatively clean. But Eames convinced us that it wasn’t good enough to have something that was good enough. For a lot of people, this was going to be their introduction to these films and this was going to be the Eames film for at least a generation. In their essence are about beauty and you had to have the most beautiful prints of them. We shut down and put together a hit squad on the Library of Congress. We showed up there with three people and the LOC offered us three or four interns and we spent three days going through shelf after shelf of film canisters. We found what we believe are very likely the best examples of their 35 mm prints.

We also found some incredible photography from Wayne Miller whose images had been buried. We also came across some films that had been made about the Eames for public television, including the raw footage from a 1973 film so we were able to get ahold of never-been-seen interview footage of Charles and Ray.

We’ve added a lot of that stuff to the DVD extras because Charles and Ray didn’t always have a very succinct way of talking. A lot of the stuff that we wanted to put in it would have taken them too long to get their thoughts out, but in a DVD extra you can just let them talk for two or three minutes. And that’s when you really get a feeling for how they talked.

One of the things that struck me was the discussion in the film about how the Eames put together the film for the 1959 Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know they had been involved in that. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you found out about that?

What they were doing was pretty experimental. It wasn’t the first multi-screen slide show, but they were still one of the first. It’s not like they could outsource to some production company to figure out how to do it. They had to build that thing up from the ground up. It took them a long time to figure out how many screens to use and they settled on seven. They had to figure out the shape of the screen. Eventually they decided on this oval shape. For them, it was very much a design process, figuring out how to make the thing work and how to get the seven projectors to be all synced up at once with the music. So it was an experimental design process of trial and error.

In addition to introducing the Eames to people who may not be familiar with design, the film brought up another topic that is particularly relevant to those in the design industry and that was the issue of credit and the Eames office. That’s an issue that modern designers and architects still face as you have the big names that become brands.

It was an issue in their time and it continues to be an issue. Unless we were just going to tell a completely hagiographic story with no blemishes whatsoever, we had to tell that. But my personal feeling is that it’s just kind of the way that it is. If you have the guts to do what Charles and Ray did and start your own studio, then you can put your name on stuff.

There’s a lot of he said/she said stories about what happened in the early years with Harry Bertoia and Herbert Matter. I think the source for a lot of the storytelling is Marilyn Neuhart, who wrote the two-volume book “The Story of Eames Furniture.” She’s been telling the story about how when the Eames plywood chair came out in 1946, a lot of people in the office believed they had a different relationship with Charles and role in the office than it turned out they actually did. They thought it was a co-op and they didn’t think they were working for Charles Eames, but rather with Charles Eames. Bertoia thought he had made the most important breakthroughs in the chair, and there’s documentation that goes both ways. In the end, it’s way more detailed than we could get into in the film.

The point of talking about that story would be to say that Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cutthroat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.

Do you have a favorite moment in the film?

It changes all the time but one scene that I’ve always loved is “Tops.” I love that film and I love how (former Eames office designer) Jeannine Oppewall narrates that film. I love how it illustrates this idea of images serving as ideas, but I also like that we did the opposite and inserted words into it.

I think there’s a kind of interesting duality in this idea of visual articulateness and verbal inarticulateness. I think that Ray and Charles were not always verbally articulate, but they were incredibly visually articulate. So I just love using that as an example of how they can express an idea so beautifully.

Are there any stories you wanted to include that you couldn’t?

Holy crap man, it’s unbelievable. There is so much stuff that the DVD has nine extra scenes that we cut from early versions of the film and there’s easily another nine that we could have put in. Charles and Ray’s early back story got cut so you don’t know that Ray was from Sacramento and went to New York to go to a finishing school. You pick up on her when she’s with painter Hans Hoffmann in the 1930s. You have no sense of Charles growing up in St. Louis or his first marriage. There is this really amazing story about Charles in St. Louis in the early 1930s at the height of the Depression. He had dropped out of architecture school so he wasn’t very well equipped to make a living during the Depression. There wasn’t a lot of work for architects anyway, so being an unlicensed architect in St. Louis at that time was kind of a drag. He basically deposited his wife and kids with her parents, and he took off on his own to Mexico in a beat-up old Model T. He traveled around Mexico for four or five months, just painting pictures, painting houses and doing odd jobs. It was during that period that he became interested in Mexican handcraft and folk art, which would have an impact on their later work and films like Day of the Dead. He also came back with a sense of himself and that he didn’t need to make a lot of money. At least in the folklore of Charles Eames that’s come down through the family, that’s one of the most important stories.

In the film, you briefly touch upon how Ray emerged as the leader of the firm after Charles’ death in 1978. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

She maintained relationships with IBM and Herman Miller and work did continue at the office. I think she spent several years really grieving. Over time she sort of came out of that shell, and she started doing things that she had never done before, like speaking engagements. Whereas Charles had always been the one who was invited to go and give talks, Ray started to give the talks with slide shows. At first she was very tentative, but over time she became much more confident.

But she was in her 70s, and she considered her main job at that point in her life to secure the their legacy. They put together the book “The Story of Eames,” which is an encyclopedia of everything they did together, with John and Marilyn Neuhart. I think that was a very combative relationship. I think Marilyn had a very different perspective on the Eames Office than Ray did, and an agenda that was the opposite of Ray’s. They also had to try and organize and categorize all of that stuff for the Library of Congress. For an older woman who was grieving the death of her lifelong partner, I think that she had a lot on her plate.

What I think is significant and interesting, it’s not so much what she did but what happened around her. Feminism eventually found its way to modernism and modernist scholarship, so people like design scholars Pat Kirkham and Joseph Giovannini started digging through Ray’s trunk at the Library of Congress for evidence of what she brought to the partnership. It was a revision of history. There was a kind of revising upward of her status in the Eames Office. In the late 1970s through the ’80s and ’90s, she began to be seen as a co-equal of Charles whereas previously she hadn’t been.

It made me think of the partnership between husband-and-wife architect team Alvar and Aino Aalto in Finland.

Pat Kirkham, a design scholar at Bard Graduate School in New York who wrote the first authorized biography of the Eames, just wrote a biography of Saul Bass and his wife, Elaine. She can probably tell you a list of 20 architects and designers where it’s actually the same story: Elaine and Saul Bass; Robbin and Lucienne Day, who were Charles and Ray’s contemporaries in England; and Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, though I don’t think they were ever involved romantically.

Have you become more interested in design since working on the documentary?

Yeah, within a limited range. I’ve become really interested in that period, in particular California design. I’m not a full-fledged design geek, but I’m enough of a furniture geek I can walk into a vintage shop and identify pieces from that era. I guess I’m on my way.

Do you want to do any more design documentaries?

I would love to. But I would only do design documentaries if I felt the designer had something to say. George Nelson, for instance. I feel like designers very often lead interesting lives and have a lot more to say than is immediately evident in looking at their products and designs, unless you really know how to read them as texts.

Do you own any Eames furniture?
I do. In fact, I’m sitting in an Eames chair right now.

See the trailer for the Eames movie and the video for Powers of Ten below:

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Photo: Helen West. Glass ornament with cardboard cap produced during WWII. In the 1930s, entrepreneur Max Eckhardt teamed up with lightbulb company Corning Glass Company to begin producing glass ornaments for the American market.

The tradition of decorating Christmas trees reputedly dates back to the seventh or eighth century. Until the late 19th century, Christmas ornaments were traditionally handmade using wood, paper or other easily accessible materials. It wasn’t until the 1880s when the German glass industry began producing hand-blown glass ornaments, which were subsequently imported to the United States. By the mid-1920s, Czechoslovakia and Japan had begun to encroach on Germany’s hold on the glass ornament market.

Photo: Helen West. Glass ornament with cardboard cap produced during WWII.

In the 1930s, an American entrepreneur named Max Eckhardt began to anticipate the outbreak of WWII and foresaw a demand for ornaments in light of an increased backlash against German-produced goods. Eckhardt then teamed up with the Corning Glass Co., which up until then had been producing light bulbs. In 1937, he founded Shiny Brite, and the “American-made” angle proved to be a major boon for the brand during WWII. Due to the war effort and subsequent metal shortages, the American ornament industry began replacing the traditional metal hooks with cardboard caps.

Photo: Helen West. Glass ornament with cardboard hook produced during WWII. Some styles of hooks fastened inside the glass ball.

It’s always a treat to open a dusty box and find a little piece of American history. These Christmas ornaments are a good reminder about the significance of design thinking: Innovations in the manufacturing process can lead to entirely new products and material shortages can encourage creativity and ingenuity. In a time when economic hardship and environmental concerns make success in the design industry that much more tenuous, it’s heartening to remember that we’ve survived and thrived despite circumstances even more challenging than those we currently face. Here’s to a 2012 full of new examples of creativity and ingenuity.

Photo: Helen West. Glass ornaments with cardboard caps produced during WWII.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

When you started working on “Helvetica” in 2005, did you already have “Urbanized” at the back of your mind?

Absolutely not. When I was making “Helvetica,” I had no plans of making other design documentaries. It was a one-off project. I’d never made a film before and didn’t know what I was doing. I wanted to watch a film about fonts, but there wasn’t anything out there so I decided to make the movie I wanted to see. Once “Helvetica” had such a great reception and was financially successful, I wanted to do another film and learn more about the process of doing a documentary. The next idea was “Objectified.” I really liked the ideas, music and visuals of “Helvetica” – the overall aesthetic – so why not use the same type of approach in a different area of design? I was also obsessed with product design and the stories behind objects.

I remember the moment when I had just started “Objectified” and I realized I was making” Helvetica II.” That’s when I had the idea of it being a sequel to “Helvetica,” and at the same time I envisioned a third film in the series. The only reason why I chose cities and urban design is probably because I was traveling so much at the time. The three topics seem to work as a series, but for me, it just feels like one big film. It just took six years to make it.

Mayor Enrique Peñalosa biking through the streets of Bogota. Image courtesy of Swiss Dots Ltd.

Are there any interviews in “Urbanized” that stand out for you?

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really commonsense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure. Candy Chang is a public visual artist who has done some really powerful but simple projects to engage people in the community to get involved in shaping it.

Candy Chang's street art project in New Orleans. Image courtesy of Swiss Dots Ltd.

How did you put the film together?

What was interesting with this film was how social media, especially Twitter, has changed the way I make films. Of course you get the word out about screenings, but I used it as a way to find ideas and projects to include in the film, such as a train station redevelopment project in Stuttgart that turns ugly. That project (Stuttgart 21) I found through Twitter. Two weeks later we were in Stuttgart on the day that all hell broke loose. The other way I ended up using it was that a lot of times I just wanted a couple of shots of a particular city to add to the visual fabric of the movie. We did this five or six times. “Hey, is there anyone in Rome? I’d like a few shots of the Piazza Navona.” They shot it and uploaded that night. I did that in Melbourne, Athens, Chicago, a couple of cities in Florida. Especially at the end of process when we were editing, and under a deadline, normally I’d just have to dream of getting a shot of the Piazza Navona. This totally changed the process when I could just tweet it and reach people around the world and get them to contribute to the project.

Model of proposed redevelopment of Stuttgart train station. Image courtesy of Swiss Dots Ltd.

I read a review in the L.A. Times that praised the movie but was a little indignant that L.A. had been left out. You include footage from more than 40 cities. How did you choose which ones?

There are so many cities we couldn’t go to that are not in the film. Our approach with “Urbanized” was not to look at specific cities. It was to look at specific, universal issues and then look at specific projects around the world. Universal issues that face all cities: We all need a roof over our head, we need clean water and sanitation, we need mobility and ways to get around, we need some place to work and we need places to relax. Whatever you want to talk about in a city, it all pretty much boils down to one of those five issues. Then we look at how different cities are dealing with them. In a way, we are making a composite city. I couldn’t think of any other way to structure it.

What kind of response have you gotten to “Urbanized”?

I think in a way, of the three movies, “Urbanized” is the most personal. Everyone lives in a city and they know what they like or don’t like about cities. Everybody wants to change their city and make it better, but a lot of people don’t really know how to go about doing that. In terms of the response to the film, I’ve never had a film where people were applauding during the film when there was something that they agree with. That’s something I’ve never experienced.

Is there a message you want people to take away from the film?

A lot of it is about how cities should work. The projects take so long that it’s a detriment because political winds change and citizens who should be involved in the project don’t even know it’s happening until the bulldozers start rolling in. It’s never the case where government is going to ask “What projects do we need?” and really use the public as a compass. The main time the public interfaces with the city is when they are against something that is already underway. They are not leading a positive initiative to get something done. That’s the takeaway of this film: Be more involved and critical about how you want your city to be.

Do you think the trilogy has helped raise public awareness about the role of design in our environment?

At the screenings events we do, there is a certain amount of preaching to the choir. People who are going to spend $20 to see a film in a theater are probably designers or at least familiar with design. But when the films are broadcast on PBS and people are scanning through the channels and run into something, those are the circumstances where we get more exposure to people who aren’t familiar with design. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say, “Netflix suggested I watch ‘Helvetica.’ A movie about a font? What? Now I look around and all I see is Helvetica.”

Watch the “Urbanized” trailer:

Ocelot by Greta Romelfanger

Ocelot skeleton by Greta Romelfanger

At UW, incoming students need to have previously taken at least one art course, have naturalistic drawing skills of animals, plants, or the human figure, and have some interest or previous education in science. In addition to refining their art skills, students also study anatomy, physiology, and cell structure. Many students are attracted to the program because it brings together science and art.

“I like the field because it’s showing nature and past with a touch that is more personal than photography,” says student Greta Romelfanger.

Another program graduate Kevin Wu works as a research engineer at UW.  “I took this course because it would be a prefect combination of my interests in art and nature. Nature is the best designer and I now look at everything with much more consideration and detail. While I am not ready to quit my day job, I definitely would like to continue drawing and painting and perhaps pick up some freelance illustration work in the future,” he says.

Tawny owl by Greta Romelfanger

Jess Stitt is another program graduate. She previously studied environmental biology and conservation. “My interests lie in attempting to communicate scientific knowledge through visual media. What I love about natural science illustration is that it represents common ground between science and art. To draw a living subject forces an artist to observe every detail and intricacy of the form, and accurately depict that in relation to all other aspects of the subject,” she says.

Tawny owl by Greta Romelfanger

Sea lion by Jess Stitt

Bat skeleton by Kelvin Wu

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.