Continued from page 163:

this.

Hjalti: Yeah.

Jan: It sounds weird.

Hjalti: It sounds weird and we always have to spell it out to everybody. Wilkerkarlsson doesn’t sound as good, so that is why we are Karlssonwilker.

Gelman: Do you have a logo?

Hjalti: No, well...

Jan: I think that it just happens that it is this gothic bold and black box.

Gelman: That is the logo type but do you have a symbol or something?

Hjalti: Not really, no.

Jan: I think that this type in a box is our logo. Symbol? No.

Hjalti: It was kind of difficult in the beginning for us to design all of these for ourselves; the business card, logo and the mailer it took us forever to do these things.

Gelman: Why?

Hjalti: It is hard to do this.

Gelman: Hard to work for yourself?

Hjalti: Yeah.

Jan: I think it is hard to work for yourself.

Hjalti: Hard yeah, you’re very critical. Like these mailers. We spent so much time going back and forth and questioning this, changing.

Jan: It is hard to talk about yourself as well.

Hjalti: It is the worst thing.

Jan: Like I should say this or this and not this.

Hjalti: We are very cautious with this.

Jan: We didn’t have anything but our name Karlssonwilker in the beginning. We just did the mailer with this first, in newsprint with these boxes and these lines.

Gelman: Did you print it with that Korean guy?

Hjalti: That Korean guy? Didn’t you find these in the beginning?

Gelman: I don’t know if you remember, I did a magazine, Obscure Objects.

Hjalti: Yeah, it was a nice magazine.

Gelman: Stephan asked me their address. He was doing a promo piece for Annie and I haven’t done anything with those guys for a while, but you went there to look for him.

Hjalti: No, I think it was the intern.

Gelman: Somebody from the office. That reminded me of the place. So I printed my 1999 poster there.

Hjalti: Yeah, I really liked that poster.

Gelman: What was the name of your... something color?

Hjalti: Welcome to Color.

Gelman: Why’s that?

Jan: In the first mailing we had this box explaining if you are tired, and you don’t want to look at all these black and white graphics and more, look at this bunnies blah, blah, blah. When we were looking for this year’s mailing we found it and thought it was sort of funny.

Gelman: Those bunnies were black and white.

Jan: You were supposed to look at these bunnies very long and they would sort of twinkle and then you wouldn’t really care anymore about the black and white design. And that was it!

Gelman: Un huh.

Jan: And in the latest one there was again this section and this time it says, "Designing for the millennium," and says you shouldn’t steal from other designers, you should steal from artists.

Gelman: Stealing ideas?

Jan: Ya sure, what else? Because you will become more successful in the new millennium if you steal from artists...

Jan: This is what we do in our spare time; we write something down or have a stupid idea.

Gelman: Do you do this under the influence of alcohol?

Hjalti: No, but sometimes. It is not really necessary.

Jan: I don’t think that alcohol fuels our, our...

Gelman: Creativity.