[00:00:02–00:00:28]
Good to see so many people here on a bit of a gloomy Wednesday morning. My name is Daniel. I'm a senior experience designer here at 1508. And I'm joined by Tobias, who is I don't even know what your English title would be, but it's head of dragons. Head of wizards. Yeah, head of head of wizards, and we're going to run you through our little passion projects.

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We were a bit unsure what to call it today. So it's all about dragons and children and learning and castles and knights, but most of all about a shared passion to do some good in the world and how we design good in the world.

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So it's both going to be from Tobias' part a lot of really, really smart words about what welfare innovation looks like and then the more maybe visual side is going to come from me on how we took that ball from the guys over at Drakonheart and formed that into a visual storytelling brand design.

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As you can see, or maybe have noticed, we've also got a couple of printouts up on the walls that you're very welcome to take a look at afterwards. We've got a lot to go through, so I might not be able to go into details on everything. So feel free to look afterwards. I even have a few examples of a little book spoiler out and about that you can take a look at. But yeah, let's get started.

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So what we're going to run you through today is a bit of how a dream can become a real life fairy tale, and how that story took shape in chapter 2. Then we've got the adventure comes alive and chapter 4 is we're only getting started and at the end hopefully some questions from you or comments that we'll be more than happy to take. Yes.

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And what we'd like to leave you with today is sort of an insight on how to go about a process like this when you're dealing with something completely new, completely made up, but also very much rooted in reality and wanting to do good in the world. And the process on how we here at 1508 sort of teamed up with the guys over at Drakonheart and made something that we feel very strongly about and also very passionately about.

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So hopefully you'll get a bit of insight into that. Again maybe a bit hard to go into details with all the elements we've made. So yeah, feel free to reach out afterwards and just yeah, so there's a dream out there about doing some good for children and learning in Denmark. And I think Tobias is really good at talking about that to you. Thank you,

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Daniel. And thank you also for leaving me with a lot of pressure when it comes to saying a lot of smart words. I'm going to do my best trying to give you an idea of how we try to transform a dream into a real life fairy tale, so to speak. So, the Drakonheart Initiative is a vision, and we are trying to build a universe, a real life universe, around that vision.

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And what I'm going to tell you about today in the chapter one is the whole idea of what Drakonheart is. It's not a superficial disruption. It's a long-term change when it comes to the educational system, the way that we work in schools with children both in Denmark and maybe over time also globally.

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It's a pleasure to see so many of you here today and I think the reason why I'm here is that I'm pretty proud of what we're doing and also very proud of the collaboration with 1508 because I think that what Daniel is going to show you later is how they've been able to capture the whole idea, the ambition, the vision of what we do and making it real into a brand. And I'm totally understanding that we are only getting started when we have the whole visual side of things and the brand.

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But it's an important foundation for us in the way that we work, the way that we communicate to the world, both in letters and in visuals and so on. So that's also a reason for me to be here today. So getting started, just a little bit about me, how I became a dragon rider.

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I usually say I've been going to school all of my life, and I still am. I used to be a teacher out in Toron at the Wild West, and I loved every minute of it or almost every minute of it. And I went from that to getting a master's degree in pedagogical sociology.

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And from there I've been a professor at teacher education at university colleges around Denmark, mostly in Copenhagen, working both with pre-service teacher education — that's the teachers of tomorrow — and also in-service teacher education — that means when we are out in practice in schools — also working in social education — that's in Danish — and working with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Research and Development in national projects, trying to bring in what we could call progressive pedagogies — change in the way that we worked with children all around Denmark.

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That led to creating something called the Future Classroom Lab, still located at Campus Carlsberg in Vesterbro, and from there on to the Playful Learning Program, still existing, built upon the six university colleges in Denmark and in a close collaboration with the LEGO Foundation, trying to make more playful approaches a part of the everyday school life of both teachers and of course the children in the classrooms out there and also in daycare institutions.

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So basically working how to change the way that we work with children on a daily basis. Not sitting like you are doing this morning. Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with that. But basically doing that 97% of the time is not the best way of learning. So trying to change that.

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And again remember when you see this — this might be new. This might be a progressive take on how we work, but basically we are inspired by long, well-known traditions also in the Nordic countries when it comes to thinking of learning in a way that is stimulating all the senses. Not only listening or writing or reading, but working with embodied, playful approaches to the way we learn.

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But again, remember culture is strong. Think of the number of times you've been walking through that door to the classroom. It's almost printed into your nervous system, how to get in there, sit on a chair, open your laptop or your book or whatever. So, the culture is so strong and changing it is really, really, really hard. Even though I guess pretty much everyone in this room knows that we should do it in a different way.

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Most teachers start at teacher education because they have a heart to make a change for kids, and still culture kind of eats it for breakfast. Okay, this is a little bit about my background. I was working at the Playful Learning Program. Everything was amazing. We had built a strong structure. We were doing research, 12 PhDs and everything was going amazing and still is.

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And then I get a phone call, and the phone call is the LEGO ecosystem. And of course, working with the LEGO Foundation, we have a strong and a long relation. And at the other end of the line there is a question: Well, would you consider coming to Djursland? We've bought a castle and do you know the designer Jim Lyngvild? We've asked him to decorate it and he's already started.

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And I was like, what? Please tell me again. And I guess the essence of the phone call is we're trying to do a lot of good and we will continue trying to do that, but we need a disruption factor. We need something totally different. I guess the whole idea behind this actually comes from the Hogwarts universe and the question: Why isn't it possible to do a real world Hogwarts? I'm going to say more about the castle and everything, and it is a real life castle from the 1600s located in Djursland, and I guess I was too curious.

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So I got in my car and went to Djursland and saw the castle, met the people there and was like, "Okay, if you're going to sit there 92 years old and look at yourself and say, 'Okay, I didn't take that chance,' I think I wouldn't be too happy with myself." So, less than a year ago, I said, "Okay, let's try. Let's give it a go." And for me the important part here is that we have a welfare challenge.

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I guess also in the circles where you usually go there's a lot of talk about wicked world problems, but this is one of them — a real wicked problem, I guess both in Denmark but also globally. We see tendencies to more and more children feeling like they're outside of the community, feeling that they don't have something to contribute, that they do not have that sense of belonging on a daily basis. And in my experience and in my professional work, it's never the responsibility of the child.

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Instead of seeing differences and the anomaly as a problem, see it as a part of the way that we work, and it's the framing around the child that might be wrong. So instead of telling the child that the child is wrong, look at the system that we've created. And the tendencies in Danish schools and in higher education is more and more performance logic, more and more accountability logic and a sense of what is normal that is more and more and more and more narrow.

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These days also on a personal level when I talk to people I guess almost 10 out of 10 or nine out of 10 either have children themselves or a close relation to children in situations that are basically not okay — feeling outside, left outside, not wanting to go to school, a diagnosis — you know the numbers just going higher and higher and higher — and still we're just pointing to the child and say, "Okay, this is a diagnosis. This is neurodivergence. This is normal. This is not normal." And I guess what we are trying to change is the system — the standards around what it is to go to school.

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There are important investments in health, in environment, medicine, and so on, but basically very little investment in welfare innovation. And what we are trying to boost is basically putting back a development department into the educational system, because at the moment there is almost no space for that on a daily basis at a school. So you get to work in the morning, you go deliver and you go out again, you go deliver, you go out again, and there's no pedagogical framing around developing the way that we work and seeing that every child is in that community.

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So that's what we want to try and change. And what better way to do it than try and do it in a castle. It's important for me to say that this is 100% purely philanthropic. And that means that we are not in a position where we have to earn money. We don't have a baseline as such. We're basically doing good. And if we make a positive change, we have the possibilities of scaling.

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We're going to start small. We're going to start slow. That's also why some of you might have heard about Drakonheart, but there's not a lot out there yet. We're deliberately taking it slow to create the right foundation, doing the first experiments, getting our experiences, and building upon that to do genuine good — to try and succeed in changing — because this is hard.

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Instead of just doing a school — a day school or whatever — that might not be an easy thing, but it would be much easier than what we are trying to do. We're building an experimentarium, an inspiratorium. Hard to pronounce, maybe it's our own word. But trying to do new things, also things that don't work, finding out where practice is best, sometimes where it's worse, and learning from that and creating knowledge, external evaluation, research, and sharing that.

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And everything happens with the children and for the children and the important grown-ups around them. So to give you an example, when classes visit the castle, we don't take the teachers and leave them outside of the castle like the kids were in Tivoli — just standing there drinking coffee. They are always a part of capacity building before, under, and after and continuously when they work with Drakonheart.

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So this is very much also building on competencies with adult teachers, pedagogues, and so on. We want to shake the system. I'm done hogging that way of working. Oh yeah, it's also hard to be out there. I know, I was there. It is pretty damn tough.

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But we can make a difference if you want to, just for once, think a little differently around how we work in schools. Why do we have to have a break where there are 400 kids — Lord of the Flies — two grown-ups in yellow vests? Why does that have to happen? Because the grown-ups need a break and a coffee. Come on.

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We could do — just to give you a very brief example — there are possibilities in the way that we work in schools. Under COVID, we could see that we could divide the kids in smaller groups, the grown-ups, the pedagogues, the teachers — work together in other ways. Just to give you also relatable examples, it is possible to make a change. This is not only for the sake of change. This is because it's very much needed to do that change, basically.

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So Daniel is going to show you more pictures of the castle. This is how it looks. It's from the 1600s and right now we are renovating it. It's the third largest house in private ownership in Denmark. So we have a lot of work to do.

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deliberately make a place where it's not possible to do what you usually do. It's extremely hard in these locations to just sit people down and talk to them in front of a whiteboard or a screen the whole day. And we want to give the kids a homey feeling. We know that a lot of the children that we work with need that sense and that atmosphere of welcoming.

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Again, think of your own school or your kid's school. Does it welcome you? Do the surroundings, the environments welcome you? Does it tell you, "Hey, great that you're here this morning. Come on, join us inside. We're going to have, you know, a great time together." That's what this framing does.

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And then all of these artworks tell stories. And the first experiences we have with the children is that they get into that narrative and their imagination is stimulated just with the surroundings. It might be disturbing. It might be overstimulating. But if you lay your arm around the child and say, "Okay, let's have a look there," you give it a focus — then all of a sudden it tells you stories instead of just being a clinical surrounding, which most schools are.

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So working with the surroundings is really important for us. So again this is welfare innovation. We want to make a more human educational system and work with pedagogical practices. Some of them we don't know yet. Some of them are pretty well known and we need to get back to that.

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So it's not necessarily a learning culture of the future. This is just now, and some of it is behind us in strong traditions where we kind of forgot what Denmark has to offer, basically, to a pedagogical framing also in a world setting. So who do we work with? We work of course with parents.

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Some of the children that I'm talking about — and remember again this is for all children. This is not necessarily only about neurodiverse children. This is for all children — and we know that when we work with learning designs for neurodiversity we basically also work with really good designs for the neurotypical children. So just to give you a framing: this is for everybody, but still we know many of the children that we are working with might be struggling outside the communities.

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This is a challenge for whole families. Also, parents struggling to find solutions on how to get to work in the morning because we have a child that doesn't want to go to school and so on and so on and so on. So, building capacity for parents, communities for parents is something that we're going to experiment with because it seems to be very much needed.

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Municipalities means daycare and school. And this also means that we have to make a change outside the castle walls. If we don't, we're going to stop. So right now we are making agreements with the two local municipalities. Remember the nose of Djursland — starting there.

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Pretty poor municipalities, especially the north of Djursland is struggling. So if we make it there, we can pretty much make it everywhere, I think, and also having satellite municipalities of larger scale, some of them in Jutland to begin with and building on from there. So if we have a success over a three to five year period, of course we're going to build upon that and my notion is that a lot of municipalities — 98 in Denmark — will be interested in some of these designs if we succeed in the starting municipalities.

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We work very closely with NGO's — I'm going to talk about that in a moment. We have a partnership agreement coming up with Save the Children — a lot of kids in their systems outside of the normal strong child communities and families. On the outside, we provide them with the possibility of summer vacations and also initiatives that build around the whole family. So working very closely with Save the Children and Haver til Maver as well.

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Teachers always being part of what we do. Also pedagogues when we work with daycare, schools, local politicians — over time also national politicians — foundations of course and the LEGO ecosystem. We have the LEGO Foundation, working very closely with them and Ole Kirks Fond. We want to try and make a change first locally, then nationally, and if we succeed here — who knows.

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So the first concepts — one of the very important foundations in what we do — you can take a look at the book later. Apart from a — okay it's gone already, amazing, it's there — it's also very, very beautiful, thanks to the wizards and peers here at 1508, but that's basically our pedagogical foundation.

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This is what we stand upon, and one of the elements there is about — I don't know the English phrase — the best translation is actually "building," so there's a part in there about nature-building — the element of understanding nature again, understanding how to sow and grow and, you know, eat — and that's why we deliberately made a partnership with Haver til Maver, started back in — I think — almost 15 years ago, something like that, and we are inviting both municipalities, all of the schools into a collaboration around that.

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Haver til Maver is going to make their headquarters in Jutland at our facility, and we're going to build magical gardens with — I don't know — beds this size and whatever. That's also an island's mad mind, but having kids coming into our gardens in our forests around the year and then also linking them into learning designs that always work with strong contributions to the community.

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Again, remember the children outside of communities often have a sense that "I have nothing to contribute." And sometimes we — in my mind at least — have a tendency to curl for them or lift them instead of saying, "Hey, welcome this morning. You're an important part of this. You have something to contribute."

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So child contribution is always a really important part of what we do. Play and creativity. And right now we are rebuilding the castle into being able to handle learning designs that tap into the very traditional aesthetic learning designs that would be — in Danish — håndværk/design, billedkunst, and so on, because we believe that the creative way of working with learning is also a pathway to the traditional academic disciplines — math, Danish language, and so on.

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So we are flipping it, working the other way around, and instead of starting with a standardized learning goal we work with notions of where we want to go — both socially, personally, and in the great academic disciplines — with children, and we analyze the other way around. So if we are at the gardens, Daniel and I would be looking for where the math skills are, how they are communicating, what they understand about biology, and so on. And then we tick off the different learning goals afterwards instead of working the other way around.

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The notion in most schools is: if I'm standing here talking to you about X, then you've learned X — and of course you haven't. So trying to change that in a very concrete, very visible, very everyday way of working. So this is how we're going to bring fantasy into the real world and of course scaling this over time — more and more experiments, more and more designs, creating more and more knowledge and sharing that knowledge over time. That's the way we're going to work. Remember again, we have pretty strong muscles when it comes to both research and evaluation and pretty strong muscles when it comes to communicating over time. So we are going to spread this — and it's going to be free.

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The last thing I'm going to say is that this has been a pleasure so far, because when we started Drakonheart, we started very much with a blank space, and it's a privilege of course to get the possibility and the opportunity, but it's also really, really hard finding out: how do you do it then? And again, I have to say we don't know yet. We don't have all the answers. I'm not sure we ever will get them, but we are getting closer and closer, and getting a partner — and we researched a lot — that kind of understood our way of working. Capturing what Drakonheart is all about has been a pleasure so far and an ongoing pleasure, and from my side I want to highlight what you've seen so far, and now we're going to dig in deeper to what's been done when it comes to creating the visual identity and the brand around Drakonheart. So, Dragon Daniel, please take us through it, and this is a thank you from me so far.

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Thank you — hard act to follow. As I told you, I always get both emotional and kind of goosebumpy when I hear you talk about the concepts and ideas behind Drakonheart. As someone who is a parent to somebody who is very much in the regular system — being neurodivergent and all that with all the diagnoses and all that stuff — it quite quickly became a passion project of mine.

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But I also think in general for 1508, and just to take on further what Tobias just said, it's really something that harmonizes and falls in line with the type of work and projects we want to do here at 1508. So I'm really glad that he said that he likes us and we have some sort of connection. But yeah, how do we take all that good stuff? How do we take all those good stories and ideas and concepts and help put them in the world?

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It's not like we here at 1508 have a lot of experience with doing the type of work that Tobias is talking about, but we have a pretty good understanding about communicating that type of work to other people. So I'm pretty much going to take you into sort of the whole journey we had with both Drakonheart, but also internally here at 1508 trying to wrap our heads around this stuff. And it was a bit of a whirlwind in more than one way, but a good whirlwind, and I think we also felt some of that disruption that is needed that Tobias is talking about. So yeah, brave ideas need brave design.

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I remember that Morten, our client lead director — I don't know if he's... oh, he's sitting over there — he came to me while I was sitting at my desk and said, "These guys bought a castle," pretty much like the phone call Tobias got. And I was like, okay, so what is it? And we were talking about, okay, is it a theme park? Is it a tourist attraction? Is it a museum? And then the whole thing about the Hogwarts breaking into real life. Okay, so is it a movie set of some sort, TV set?

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So we had a lot of ideas what this could be and of course all of it sounded exciting. I don't think we had any real notion about what this would turn into. Yeah. So the first visits we had just to learn about the place and what it was actually like — we got a lot of stimuli, a lot of visual inspiration from the get-go.

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Obviously some of you, many of you probably know Jim Lyngvild and he's just — I know you probably, and I also had my own preconceived notion of what that would be like to work with him. But one thing I would say is I've met few other people or clients with as much passion and as much drive as he has. So we got this again magical tour of the castle up there and already began to get a sense of, okay, what can we root this brand design that we're supposed to do? What can we root this in?

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In? So there's all these historical being taken care of. There's all this artwork that Jim has designed, which comes from — you know, that's all new, that's fantasy, that's sort of not rooted in anything realistic, so to speak. But then we also have these old books and we've got stories about the Count or Earl who used to live there who almost went bankrupt because he went on a shopping spree of buying books and artworks and artifacts and stuff like that all around Europe. And yeah, there was this monastery connected to the castle that had to basically leave in the middle of the night because I think one of the nuns died, basically.

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So yeah, it was a lot of inputs, but also trying to filter a lot of that stuff. And as you can see, there's a lot of really magical physical space to it. Not just in the interior designs that Jim has been putting together, which was a clear inspiration, as you'll probably see later, hopefully, but also the physicality of it being placed in the middle of Djursland, and there's, you know, taller skies, there's actual trees, there's actually green stuff around you.

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So yeah, a bit of an eye-opener and highly stimulating, but also a bit daunting to try to form this into something that's supposed to be cohesive and understandable for everybody. So that brings us to the creative challenge that we saw. We have all these things that we need to blend together. We have this real historical building and heritage. We have all this fantasy and imagination inspired by Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings — all these great things that we know from high fantasy.

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We also got the stories from the team up at Drakonheart, which really lends itself to some sort of courage and curiosity also on behalf of the audience who gets to experience this. And then absolutely innovation, uniqueness — we always want to do that for brands. If everybody's over here communicating, why not try and be somewhere else that has a tendency to punch through a bit better — and then a very physical iconic place that we also have to take care of — and all this has to be brought into one coherent universe.

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So yeah, as I said, pretty daunting. It led to sort of what I call "theory of everything is possible" syndrome. And we got to talking when we got home from those initial visits: "Oh, but it could be this and it could be that and it could be everything." So we didn't have any real clear idea on how to solve these clear creative challenges — not in the normal sense, not in the normal way we do — except that we thought we should talk about it and we should talk about what we want to do with Drakonheart.

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So luckily I have some really, really talented and smart colleagues here who suggested we do what is called a sort of brand narrative design as our pre-RO before we did anything else, just to get our heads around everything. And so doing all that we also had some internal workshops where we also kind of figured out — we had all these ideas — and again, maybe speaking a bit to the neurodiversity side of things, I have this little theory I call that everyone is a lens. It's really — in this type of scenario where you have to solve a really complex creative problem in a clear way — really beneficial to mix up teams and skill sets and personalities. And what I mean by everybody is a lens is that you can have people maybe like me who are a bit scatterbrained — who are good at taking an idea and concept and throwing it up in the air and seeing, "Oh, it could be this direction," or "it could be that direction," maybe only getting skin-deep into an idea.

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And then you maybe have somebody who's the inverse, who's really good at taking that rabbit hole and going really far down into it and being very specific and detail oriented and outcome oriented, as opposed to myself who's really good at throwing things up in the air. So it's really good to mix those people.

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And that's sort of what we did when we got home. We put, as you saw before, people in a room, and we got all these ideas — everything from physical to design to digital to just like: what would the packaging look like if you got an invitation to Drakonheart?

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What would an exhibition look like there? Also, obviously, logos, fonts, visual styling — all that good stuff. As you can see, we ended up with tons of mood boards inspired by — like, so we have gaming and history and heraldic and classical fantasy legacy, more modern illustration styles, fonts, colors, iconography — all that good stuff.

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And then also when we begin to mix this with all the different people's ideas — what if we did a robot or a chatbot that the kids could interact with before they get to the castle to calm everybody down and make the place more understandable before you get there? Could it be a Minecraft universe that they could explore the castle in before you get to the castle?

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Again, we had people who thought of: what if we have our own alphabet that the kids could learn and it's their thing? And all these things become this big thing of: so what do we show Drakonheart? And that's where we came up with the idea catalog, and we basically — I think — just more or less said we weren't going to show Drakonheart the final solution.

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And I think also just in terms of experience, that never really works. You can go away and lock yourselves away for four weeks, five weeks, two months, half a year as a designer and come up with your grand presentation and tell the client, "Here it is," and hopefully they'll buy it and hopefully you've done your homework and everything is good. But here, we wanted to flip it a bit and say, "We thought of all this stuff. We don't know what's good. In dialogue with you at Drakonheart, we can figure out what is really good."

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And again going back to some of the capabilities we have at Drakonheart — you've just heard Tobias talk really profoundly about all the good stuff about education and why we need welfare innovation. We also had the drive of Jim and all the other good people who are associated with Drakonheart. So this was very much — I know we often talk about collaboration in our agency life — but this was actually one of the times where it was super important and actually also worked really well.

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So yes. Just some of the stuff we sort of showed them — both from a visual standpoint to some of the alphabets and mythical rooms and stuff — Jonas, our motion designer, came up with apparel. Again, not that this was supposed to be the final solution, but just that we had that ambition for Drakonheart and for — hopefully — our client. Illustration style — so, this was based off the Earl I talked to you about. He was known as "the Wild Earl."

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We had an idea of illustrating or setting his whole universe, bringing that to life. What if that was an app you could talk to or something like that — and it tells you wild, crazy stories — and hopefully you could filter out what was true and what was not true. I remember at one of the first meetings when we showed this illustration style, Jim mentioned that one of his visionary ideas for Drakonheart was: there's something in these stories that is rooted in reality, but it's also what you make of them.

[00:37:01–00:37:20]
As Tobias talked about before, telling a kid to come into this universe and "you can make up whatever you want" with this style, this illustration, this curriculum you're going through, and make up your own world — that's really good. This is open to interpretation.

[00:37:20–00:37:45]
And that stuck with me — that whole "born from Münchhausen" — and I think Jim has a sentence that it's okay to lie. So we lied a lot. We also tried the other more traditional approach: how can we tie what we're going to do into the region where the castle is? Going back to old Danish illustration styles of dragons and myths and stuff like that.

[00:37:54–00:38:13]
Again, this was just purely an idea catalog — not meant to be the final solution — but just to show Drakonheart this is where our minds are going. Help us filter it in. So the first workshops, having shown all of that, sort of narrowed it down to: what are the central themes that we need to work with? How can we use dragons as a symbol — maybe something that's not dangerous but more wise and caring and fun, playful — long history also with dragons.

[00:38:26–00:38:53]
These concepts that Tobias has also been talking about: having the courage to do good in the world but also be transformative and learning as well. They have this really fun little thing for the kids where they have this almost Narniaesque wardrobe that kids get to go through before they go into the castle. Again, very literal metaphor of transformation that we wanted to catch.

[00:38:53–00:39:25]
Then we also — of course — since we have Jim and he is so keyed into what he thinks Drakonheart is in a visual sense, we already started exploring possible directions and did early experiments and got immediate feedback that was really, really helpful. And then through our brand narrative workshops, we actually captured a lot of that in text — in written form — which is not new to me, but having something that is supposed to be this visually magical universe rooted in something that is readable, that's text-based, was also quite magical.

[00:39:25–00:39:54]
So we have these three documents that we helped facilitate to make, and through discussions and talks we have the Dragon Pledge, we have the Guiding Principles, and a classical purpose statement. I think I just have the Dragon Pledge. Oh, so here are the workshops that we did for the whole brand narrative, and you can see a lot of post-its and a lot of guys — I don't know why — standing in a room — actually in this room — and talking about what we are, but also maybe more specifically what we aren't.

[00:40:05–00:40:30]
And we do have some specific exercises that we like people to go through. We have a point of departure — where's everybody coming from? What are their roles? We have this butterfly model that Morten knows a lot more about — talk to him about that. We have some brand sliders where it's very much like: how Hogwarts are you versus how Oxford are you? How new fantasy versus Lord of the Rings are you? How digital versus maybe experimental or physical experience are you?

[00:40:37–00:41:00]
So we had all these sliders and often it's not so much what you're about but what you're not about. I think that's really powerful. And then we formed it on day two to be able to write this purpose, these manifestos, and these brand values that I talk about in these documents, and also facilitating the vision that Tobias also talked about. Right now it's very local focused, but I know the guys have an ambition to be world dominant at some point — so really looking forward to that — and it's always just a fun experiment to see where we can take this in one year or five or ten.

[00:41:20–00:41:43]
So that was a core narrative shaped through dialogue, and that was really powerful. It helped us to create these — I tend to call them creative lighthouses — that are just short sentences of what we want to be. And these can obviously change over time, but at least we have a common understanding both internally here at our agency and at Drakonheart. And when we meet, every time we take a decision on design or tone of voice or wording or experience or anything like that, it has to point towards these lighthouses, and we can explain to other people what it is we've made or what we want to do.

[00:42:02–00:42:27]
Yes. So an example here is just the Dragon Pledge. Sorry, I only have it in Danish. I'm not sure I had the capabilities to translate it into English, but again, having something that is not set in stone, but at least written out, is super powerful. And I think Jim thought so as well. So he's made these woven tapestries or gobelins — I'm not sure what the English word is — but tapestries that he's printed out and they're actually hanging in the castle.

[00:42:27–00:42:54]
And from a designer's perspective, it's so cool to see something that usually lives on a screen and in digital form being put into the world physically. And "we never yell at children" is super powerful and fun to do. So yeah, based off all that, that helped us establish our visual directions. We of course used mood boards and style frames — I think we've seen some of them already — clarifying what we're not.

[00:43:00–00:43:26]
And then also the castle architecture and interior design. We've got this fantasy aesthetic. Also a very real connection to the Nordic nature with the collaborations that Tobias also mentioned. And then there's definitely — in a visual sense — Jim's vision. So we started again taking all that and condensing it down.

[00:43:26–00:43:52]
For example, you can see around we have this very distinct — I would say — visual illustrative style that we both use for different elements, and in the book you will see later that is actually from one of the books we found in the library at the castle. We've got a bunch of them and said, "Okay, there's something here." We use this style combined with our free-forming fantasy, digitally enabled world. What comes out of that? We got to experiment with that and found something that we're quite proud of.

[00:44:03–00:44:32]
Yes, I can address some of the AI elephants in the room. We've used AI and I can maybe get into that a bit more, but it's simply — for us — very much a tool and it's also a means to help ideas live. I've given a talk on AI in one of our previous Moon Booster talks where I think I quote Rick Rubin, the famous music producer. He talks a lot about ideas needing to be manifested to have some sort of value, and that is what AI helps us to do. It helps us manifest ideas — at least here, the way we use it.

[00:44:39–00:45:06]
Whether or not it's the right way — that's for another Moon Booster — but I think we're quite proud of the way we've done it. So yeah, using a lot of that to experiment with if we had this universe and we had these infinite possibilities and all these alphabets and this aesthetic, how can we use AI together with some really powerful illustrations and ideas?

[00:45:06–00:45:32]
What then happens? How could the castle look in the winter compared to the spring, compared to the summer? How could the dragons adapt into the universe that already exists? All that stuff. And again, not as a way to bypass good illustrators or copywriters or anything like that, but as a way of saying: this person here, who may not necessarily be a trained illustrator or pure graphic designer, has a lot of good ideas — a lot of good creative ideas — and AI is a means for them to bring that to life.

[00:45:32–00:46:07]
So yeah, really good example here. I know we briefly talked about that previously, but one of the sort of creative lighthouses one of our copywriters came up with was that we want to be a magical library for a curious few, which I think is a really wonderful statement. And also just the idea of the curious few — of course making it about the children that want to come into this universe, and they're at a place, maybe not physically located at Drakonheart castle, but at some point, they're a bit outside the class, so to speak. They feel a bit different — the kids.

[00:46:07–00:46:35]
So the curious few for me — I was like, oh great, we have a curiosity lighthouse somewhere here. And we also have this method that Tina, one of our design directors, came up with where we say, okay, no matter what we're doing — let's say it's a digital interface — can it adapt? If it needs to speak to children and it needs to speak to teachers and donors and grown-ups at the same time, can we adapt it? Can it be curious? Can it be brave?

[00:46:35–00:47:03]
Can it be welcoming? And could we take the same universal design and apply that as sort of a system-level lens and say, okay, is this too much or is it too little? Is this too scary? Not scary enough? Is it too fantastical and fantasy-like? Or is it too real and too concrete? So having these creative lighthouses has meant a lot to us and we still use them to this day in working with these guys.

[00:47:03–00:47:31]
So yeah, in terms of visual principles, of course we have a logo. I'm not going to delve too much into that, but one of the other things where the alphabets come in — again going back to the possible worlds telescope — is that we have this idea from Jim that everything and all these worlds and all these kids who come through Drakonheart, they exist or can exist in different worlds and different universes at the same time.

[00:47:31–00:48:02]
So we said, okay, what if we take that quite literally as a visual design principle and say we have this light mode, dark mode sort of aesthetic going on where we can have a representation of safety and comfort and familiarity in maybe more light design colors and then a bit more unknown fantasy and adventure in darker colors and try to mix these two together. One of the things we also did with that is we had a visual idea that grew a little bit out of the typographic exploration that we did.

[00:48:02–00:48:31]
So we came up with this drop cap alphabet where we went into some of the old illustrations that you might see on the wall over there and pulled out some of these large flourished letters that we then began to use and stylize a bit and say, okay, what if we actually try to apply a classic book design principle where you have these drop caps at the beginning of a chapter or at the beginning of a sentence, and we apply that to Drakonheart?

[00:48:31–00:49:01]
Could that become a cornerstone for this identity? And this also began to show that there's something about this handmade aesthetic that's really strong. So we began to use a typeface called Castellini Pro — a blackletter typeface — mixed that with a more contemporary serif typeface. And that got into this magic. So if you try to picture maybe in a digital setting, for example, or maybe in a book: how can we do this? Can we use a language-based entry point into the world for kids so they aren't immediately overwhelmed by: "Oh my goodness, there's dragons, there's spaceships, and rockets"?

[00:49:01–00:49:32]
Instead of directly being thrown into that, if we begin by talking about words and alphabets and typography and stories — storytelling as one of the most important things we do here — at least with a brand like this — then maybe that is a good grounding tool, and then they can go out into these fantastic universes. So we use the alphabet as a literal starting point, both in the web design and for the stuff we've done for them.

[00:49:32–00:50:01]
So here are some examples again. Obviously some posters. Here we have where we mix the alphabet with some of the dragons and all that. We had that around the workshop we did for them and you can see we've got Jim and some of the other business partners standing around talking about these things while the dragons stand guard behind them. Book covers — trying to use that in the alphabet and different Baglinski sort of landscapes that are mixed with what we see in the books and who we see at Drakonheart has also been super fun to do.

[00:50:01–00:50:34]
So yeah, we've done a lot of that stuff and this leads into more or less the last thing — the book, which I'll show you a video of. I talked to Tobias about how do you build a nation instead of just a brand, and maybe he's better equipped to answer that, but at least you can give it a go and say we've tried to make a lot of the stuff that we do and the stuff we've worked on together into something that is aimed at for example teachers who get to actually use the stuff that Drakonheart is working on, and we want to put that into the real world somehow.

[00:50:34–00:51:01]
So we talked about that and how that — like, what is a good example of something like that? We talked about stuff like the Danish Højskole tradition where we at some point a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, had these books and the preachers went out into the country and basically preached these ideas out to everybody. We talked about that as an analogy.

[00:51:01–00:51:33]
We talked about different other examples. Then we just sort of landed on simplicity and said, okay, why don't we just make a book for the guys and we capture the ideas that we've talked about? So obviously it's also a showcase and we can show them here's what we're capable of, but primarily over the long term what we want the book to be is something that teachers are handed when they come up there and can bring home with them and say, "Okay, this is what we saw up there. This is what the kids experienced."

[00:51:33–00:52:02]
"These are the values that we want to work with while working with the kids," and using that as a tool so that, again, when you get back into the daily grind at the school, you're not going to forget that that much when you have that as a physical representation. So I'll just show you this super quickly. Again, one of the cool things here was that we got to really expand on the illustration styles that we've worked on, the typography, and mixing all that. And branch out with this whole illustration universe and putting it into a physical world was very freeing compared to some of the other stuff we get to do here.

[00:51:56–00:52:31]
And also it was again a whirlwind project. We didn't have to go through a big branding department or marketing department or levels of politics within an organization. This was a typical example of Drakonheart's can-do attitude and wanting to disrupt. So, small video more on what the book ended up looking like. There's a bit of reruns, and this also — again — a valuable learning experience for us on, for example, how we do portraits and highlight persons and all that good stuff, but also the value of putting what we do out into the physical world.

[00:52:31–00:53:02]
So yeah, extremely proud of that, and I hope you haven't stolen all of the copies. Please leave them here — the books — so other people can look through them. Yeah, extremely proud of that part. And again that led us into, okay, what if we can use our drop cap alphabet in a new way? What if people could do posters when they come to the castle? What if we could do badges for the kids when they go through different courses and stuff like that?

[00:53:10–00:53:42]
So it led to all these ideas. What if a textbook looked completely different than the books you get at a normal school? What if there was a car? — all this good stuff — and again that is just the vibe, that is the energy that you get from working with people like the guys at Drakonheart, and I'm so fortunate that we've done it. But yeah, it's only the beginning. I think there's a lot more to come.

[00:53:49–00:54:21]
So this is a very, very small section of what we've done for the guys, what they've done for us, and the collaborations we're doing and hopefully also what we're going to put into the world further forward. Yeah, thank you so much for listening.