Stockholm, July 10th, 2024

With offices in Stockholm, Florianópolis and Reykjavík, 14islands is a creative design and development studio that loves to build beautiful sites, digital products and creative experiences. Its team fosters an inclusive culture of craft, collaboration and creativity, crafting meaningful connections between business and people. Its services include everything from strategy and branding to design and creative tech.

David Lindkvist is the Creative Tech Director and Co-founder of 14islands, based in Stockholm. In an interview with TIA, he highlighted the agency’s passion for working with emerging technologies and explained how they balance this with meeting the clients’ expectations. He also gave examples of some of their recent work and listed the AI-driven tools or platforms that have become indispensable in their workflow.

Let’s start with a personal touch, can you describe your neighborhood and what makes it unique?

Our office in Stockholm is located in the island of Södermalm, or “Söder” (South). It has a unique vibe with cobblestone streets, wooden houses, and trendy shops and cafés. It’s relaxed, friendly atmosphere with lots of green areas and water views. We sometimes go for a swim during lunch!

What’s one must-do experience in Stockholm in your opinion?

The city is great, but you absolutely have to take one of the numerous boats out into the archipelago. There are hundreds of islands to explore, the larger ones usually have a B&B and a cozy tavern. It’s truly special.

Can you share a bit about your journey in the tech world and what led you to co found 14Islands?

I started out over 20 years ago working for enterprise clients and finally made my way into the creative side of development, working for one of the biggest global design agencies back then. We started 14islands with the goal to have world class designers and creative developers working closely together to make sure we can design innovative solutions that are grounded in reality.

Your team at 14Islands is known for working with emerging technologies like WebGL, WebXR, and AI integrations. What excites you most about these technologies?

We’ve always had a passion for emerging technologies and the accessible nature of the web. We truly want to create a better experience for users and moments of delight. The fact that we can now use open technologies to ship advanced 3D and XR experience directly to browsers without the user having to download and install an app, is groundbreaking.

How do you balance the need for innovation and experimentation with the practical requirements of meeting client expectations and delivering successful projects?

We’ve seen enough to know that design and development cannot happen in isolation. This is such a common mistake that led to bad outcomes.
At 14islands, we make sure to have a tech lead involved, not just at the start to gather requirements, but throughout the entire concept phase. For more ambitious projects we usually do code prototypes together with the design team, coming up with a viable solution together.
Designers can usually push developers to do more than they thought was possible — we don’t want to limit creativity too much at the start. But in the end, we have to stay realistic and not oversell the concept to make sure it can be implemented with high quality.

Could you walk us through the initial steps of the partnership with Krepling?

We usually start our projects with a discovery phase to embrace ourselves in as much information as we get about the client and their business. We made sure to deeply understand their product, why they’re successful, and what makes them different from other eCommerce tools.
We identitfied Workflows as a key feature that sets them apart, so we made it a highlight, and helped them tell a simple and engaging story of their overall product (without sounding technical). Their ambition was to make a brand experience in class with stripe.com or webflow.com – which was a key delivery for us.

How did you ensure that Krepling’s website is scalable and can handle the growth of their eCommerce platform?

We usually build larger sites using component systems that can be combined into new pages. It starts in Figma where we create components, given them meaningful names, and implement them as page blocks in the CMS. For larger projects with dynamic page templates it’s very important to be consistent in the naming across design/code/cms to keep things organized and maintainable.

The Blobmixer experience has been a hit since its creation in 2021. What inspired the idea, and how did it become such a popular feature?

The Blobmixer actually started as one of our internal WebGL hacks. Our talented design team got excited by the prototype and helped elevate it into a fun and playful experience. I think the fact that users can easily customize and explore their own designs in a generative way led to its success.

Can you describe the technical stack used to develop Blobmixer, particularly the use of WebGL?

We are big fans of the popular Three.js library, and more specifically its React wrapper, called React Three Fiber. We like the declarative nature of React which makes it easier to re-use components and write code faster.
The technique to create these blobs is called Physically Based Rendering – the same lighting technique used in many games. It’s a way to model the physical properties of a material and see how it interacts with the environment.
As most of our projects, it’s a mix of accessible HTML and a WebGL canvas. Mixing HTML and an WebGL is quite hard when doing it in an accessible way, we open sourced our internal library to solve this problem.

You’ve partnered with Cyberhaven to build a new page for Linea AI. How did this collaboration come about, and what sets Linea AI apart in the field of artificial intelligence?

We had worked with their marketing director in the past, and he reached out to us. We get a lot of our work through personal leads and our reputation for doing great work. We try to build meaningful partnerships with our clients – they know that we are someone they can trust and that they can rely on us to solve whatever problems they may have.

What role do you see AI playing in the future of web design and development?

AI is only going to improve from here, and we as agencies, need to learn how to use it as tool to improve our workflow. As with most tools, you need experienced makers that understand the craft in order to get good results.

Can you talk about any AI-driven tools or platforms that have become indispensable in your workflow?

We’ve started to incorporate more and more AI tools in our day-to-day work. We sometimes use Midjourney to create moodboard or to brainstorm asset styles before we start production.
It seems these tools are very useful for unblocking the creating process and creating a starting point for us to continue crafting. For instance using ChatGPT for UX/copy writing or Github Copilot for coding. It saves both us and the client time.
There are a lot of promising AI tools, for instance, we’ve been experimenting with https://www.blockadelabs.com/ to generate 360 environments and skyboxes for use in 3D/XR.

Do you think someone can get into the field without educational experience in a school environment?

Yes, I’m a big believer in passion as a driving force. Some of the most talented artists, musicians and creatives that I’ve met were not classically schooled. However, the right school or course can provide a good structure for someone to jump start their journey.

When you have free time, what hobbies or leisure activities do you find most enjoyable and rejuvenating?

I’ve been playing drums for 30+ years in various bands, it’s a great way to blow off some steam and step away from the screen.

As someone who enjoys challenges, is there any lesson you’ve had to learn multiple times?

Learning something new can be very scary, but also very rewarding. The older we get, the rarer it becomes to be a complete beginner at something. It’s good to push ourselves out of the comfort zone now and again.

What would you place in a time capsule to represent the best of our age?

I would try to preserve a couple of handcrafted creative works that are likely to become partially replaced by AI derivatives. Maybe an oil painting or a recorded music album complete with artwork and sleeve notes – things that took a long time for someone to create.

Thanks David!

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