Our primary products are design and technology. We deliver flyers, posters, ads, magazines and catalogues printed on good old-fashioned paper, and web sites based on our own customizable CMS.
We’re located in Oslo, Norway
Office hours are from 9am to 15:30pm Central European Time, Monday to Friday. Current time in Oslo.
Graphic Designer and Managing Director
Established Manual design after two years at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and a short period as a freelance designer and inhouse designer at EMI Norway. Hands on experience with the music industry, performing arts and fine art culture working with artist identities, packaging, B2B communication, festivals and events, art and style. Related business experience from board positions at the local Oslo-group of The Norwegian Association of Graphic Designers and Illustrators (Grafill) and Alarm Music Awards.
thomas@manualdesign.no / LinkenIn / twitter / last.fm
Phone +47 22 40 10 56
Graphic Designer
Gero is our second print designer. He is at his prime when everything is on schedule, documented and in order. Responsible for all printed material for our biggest clients. His background from advertising makes him our chief brainstormer and ideas person.
gero@manualdesign.no / LinkedIn
Phone +47 22 40 10 51
Interactive developer
Senior Rails developer. Has ten years of industry experience from both IT and advertising. Favours agile development and open source over traditional models. Specialist in usability, interactive design, information architecture and general buzzword compliance.
inge@manualdesign.no / LinkedIn / twitter / last.fm
Phone +47 22 40 10 52
A selected list of companies and institutions:
Pages is our own content management system used for some fifty customer projects so far. The product makes it easy for us to tailor web sites or use it as a foundation for special solutions. Pages is developed in collaboration with customers and fits everything from small presentation sites to websites with larger volumes of editorial content. We focus on combining a simple and intuitive user interface with modern web technology.
Pages is implemented as a plugin for Ruby on Rails, and we have also created a small ecosystem of plugins that extend the functionality as needed.
Tourkit is a Web-based communication tools to plan and organize tours, developed in collaboration with Jo Strømgren Kompani. All parties have a full overview of the itinerary, accommodation, travel companions, executives and the necessary documents. The solution is currently in closed beta with a small selection of pilot users.
In collaboration with Tono, Mediacom and EMI Music Norway, we develop the music scout Lovly.no – a service which tracks wich Norwegian artists are hottest right now on the social network, and presents a toplist where users can stream or buy music. We track and retrieve metadata from a variety of services, including Twitter, Facebook, Twingly, Last.fm, iTunes, Spotify, and most of the Norwegian and a variety of foreign blogs.
The service is still under development, and in the near future we are launching a new version in which user participation is the focus.
In cooperation with by:Larm, we have developed a comprehensive internal system for festivals, built on our CMS Pages.
Each year between 1000 and 1500 bands apply to participate on by:Larm. The booking group use our tool to select hundreds of bands that they have faith in, and to set up this year’s program. The users are uploading large amounts of data (songs, photos, video, stageplots, riders), which we store on Amazon S3. The same data are later used to introduce the artists on by:Larms website, and to generate all printed matter through export to Quark Xpress and InDesign.
by:Larm is very much an industry festival, with thousands of participants each year. Backstage handles everything from registration and payment to check-in and printing of individual passport, and follow-up in the form of SMS updates during and after surveys.
by:Larm News is a newspaper that is published during the festival, with tight deadlines. Journalists and photographers logs in on the Internet via their mobile phone number and upload text and pictures to the web solution. The editors do online proofing, and exports finished formatted reviews directly to InDesign.
Beyond this, the system also handles hotel bookings and organizing volunteers.
The fans were allowed to decide which album Motorpsycho would perform in its entirety on the festival 2010. We created a solution where users selected three albums and gave their vote via a Facebook application integrated on the festival website. Thanks to the viral spread of Facebook came in thousands of votes during the competition period, the majority during the first few days.
In collaboration with Byggmakker and Mediacom, we developed Godtjobba.no. The solution allows you to find good craftsmen in the vicinity, based on recommendations from other users. Users can also ask questions and get answers from the craftsmen, Byggmakker employees or other users.
Craftsman database with map data are taken from Bring, translated from the UTM coordinates to lat / long and integrated with Google Maps. Positioning of users is done via lookup of the IP address and search history. Login is done via codes sent by SMS.
Every year, by:Larm festival and Øyafestivalen arrange speed meetings for the music industry. We have developed a best effort solution that sets up all the meetings, taking into account individual preferences and overall value for each participant. The system is integrated with the back-end solution for both festivals, all communication with the participants takes place online and the printed program will also automatically generated.
Posten Norge wanted to collect suggestions from users during the development of their new service, a digital mailbox. We developed lab.digipost.no that allows users to register and submit ideas. At the same time as being a communication channel for the customer, users participate and put their mark on the service. All feedback and suggestions are rewarded with points and Posten Norge can focus on proposals that will be implemented or already exist.
The result is that the new service, which initially was met with skepticism, now self-generating positive attention and inspires debate among future users. And not least, good ideas!
Users can of course also register / login with both OpenID and Facebook.
Grev Wedel Plass Auksjoner: Live auction
Alarm Awards: Nomination by SMS
Home Entertainment Group: Invitational system
Farojournalen: Affiliate System
Festival: Forum
We host our applications and clients web sites ourselves.
The hardware is provided by Blix Solutions AS and located at Datasenteret.
