The Platinum Egg 2015: Björn Kusoffsky.
Björn Kusoffsky was born in 1965, the third in a family of four children, and grew up in the cosmopolitan combination of Järfälla, Lidingö and Mexico City. That may sound like no ordinary childhood, nor was it ordinary that his and his friends’ teenage band Rat Fab, through a combination of coincidences and the forcefulness of youth, had the cover of their first single designed by Andy Warhol. Keyboardist Björn thus came to understand the power of design, and headed off to Beckmans College of Design a few years later.... There he met inspiring teachers, including Tom Hedqvist, which led to a five-year stint at Tom’s FGH, an ad agency operating in the borderlands between design and communication. An ultrashort stint (Monday–Thursday) at the hot Paradiset agency in the mid-90s caused Björn to realize what was actually motivating him, and in 1998, he founded Stockholm Design Lab. From the beginning, the goal was to take a unified approach to the design of every contact point of a brand, and thus the team included strategists, architects and designers. The rest is Swedish design history, though with an increasingly international profile in recent years. The agency got off to a flying start with the reprofiling of SAS, a job that echoed into the future, providing a force for lift-off (naturally). The list of brands it has created, developed or redesigned is as long as a multinational brand manual. Always done with confident quality, simplicity and openness. Always built on careful analysis and thoughtfully conceived strategy. Whether or not it’s pretty makes no difference, Björn says, design is supposed to solve a problem. “We’re trying to create relevant, functional things. You can never get by, just by being pretty. On the other hand, business benefits and relevant functions often lead to good aesthetics. We’re glad for that.”