The Platinum Egg 1979: Lars Hall.
Lars Hall (1938–2018) was admitted to Konstfack, the College of Arts, Crafts and Design, when he was just 15 years old. After a stint at Dagens Nyheter’s design studio and a few years at an agency, he was discovered by Alf Mork. At Arbman, he and Jan Cederquist brought an explosive new power to the ongoing creative revolution. In 1973, he founded Hall & Cederquist, which was to become the dominant creative force in Swedish advertising for the next two decades.... In his spare time, he and photographer Lennart Durehed launched Camera Obscura, a gallery that introduced world-class photographers to the Swedish arts audience. Lars Hall’s taste was unerring. It was no secret that he limited himself to just three typefaces as an art director, but he worked magic with them like few others.
After the Platinum Egg: At Kaptensgatan 6 in Östermalm, in collaboration with architect Axel Kandell, Lars designed the most aesthetically fully realized office Stockholm had ever seen for the agency. The paint was barely dry before he moved to New York to open a US office for H&C. American companies proved tough to win over, however, and in 1988, he came back to his old room at the agency. The following year, it was sold to Young & Rubicam, but he continued to create award-winning campaigns until 1995 – such as one for NK’s transition from a traditional department store to a retail collective model, and an election campaign for the Centre Party. He spent the final years of his career at his own design firm, Lars Hall AB, working with clients both large and small. Like most of the greats, Lars had a complex nature. For his 60th birthday, his wife Karin arranged for their friend Irving Penn to shoot a portrait of Lars in New York. He did so, and after a while Penn sent two preliminary prints to Stockholm for Lars to choose between: A. Lars (in his typical baseball cap), with an expression of such grave seriousness that it must have silenced the birds on the glass roof of Penn’s studio during the shoot, and B. Lars (in the same cap), relaxed and laughing with his tongue sticking out. Lars did not hesitate for an instant.