What a year! The stories continue…
Despite the obvious challenges of our time, it’s been a great year for Stories Without Endings, and for me ending my second full year on my own as consultant and freelancer.
UX driven product design
For now, I’ve landed on this short description of what I do: “UX-driven product design”. And the year has been filled with just that.
From a few smaller UX projects for Dental Media and Smallbrooks in the Spring. I went on to build a few full product projects. The app and website O-teknik for orienteering runners around Copenhagen, and a case story website for my friends Jonas and Silas aka Kenton Slash Demon and their sound design company waa.
Another great music-related project went live during the year, that I’ve been working on with strategic assistance and UX design: Soundtracktor, a Danish startup offering composers and music producers a new way to sell music to commercial agencies, and agencies an easier way to find suitable music for their projects.
Webflow and Bubble.io
Gaining status as Webflow Expert Partner early in the year has led to a lot of small and exciting jobs and collaborations. Currently, I’m designing and implementing two bigger projects in Webflow. One for the Scottish-based slow travel platform Slow Adventure, and one for the Norwegian-based offshore company DeepOcean. While I’m still working on refinements and development of the alumni website for University College Copenhagen / Københavns Professionshøjskole.
The year also brought me deep into a new platform: Bubble.io, on which I based a major redesign of the Danish platform ForskningNu that helps scientists and researchers find qualified research subjects more easily. I built the entire platform on Bubble.io upon great insights from an already established proof of concept by the founder and CEO Benjamin Graungaard,
It was my first full Bubble.io project, and, as mainly a UX-driven product designer, I had a great time being able to do everything on my own, from sketches and ideas over UX, UI, and the final implementation for both backend workflows, database, and front-end.
After building and launching the ForskningNu platform pretty much all on my own, I had a great chance to work more closely with other UX’ers and designers again with three months freelance collaboration as UX Designer at Flip Studio (now Acceleration and part of GroupM) working on a big redesign of a partner platform for the biggest Danish telco provider TDC NET.
New projects
Working with others is great, but I keep finding myself pushing towards new opportunities even without anyone joining me to begin with. So earlier this year I went ahead and published the idea of AJOUR — an attempt to build a ‘Spotify for news’ platform with the intention to offer all written news in Danish as a subscription service. A locally rooted tech platform, based on journalistic principles, within democratic control and with no advertisement or unsolicited data collection.
On a more personal note, the year also brought me to new places. I released a full-length album under the artist name Nolo, called THE LONG RUN followed by a few audiovisual live shows over the summer.
And, on another artistic note, my year ended pushing the graphic design with my poster studio Storymaps Studio across new limits with a new work I’m very proud of, based on the story of an old childhood friend and his family and the colors of Poul Gernes.
And that’s pretty much it. Even though traveling has been restricted, my year as a designer has brought me many new places. Hopefully, this will continue next year too. And hopefully, we’ll see each other more too.
Have a great new years! :)
— Jesper
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