The award committee's motivation

"Hjalti Karlsson's broad approach to typography, graphic design and visual communication rests on a clear humanistic and artistic foundation. His work ranges from the intimate small-scale object to the inclusive communication of the comprehensive profile program. From the newspaper page to the moving graphics, from the educational exhibition form to the site-specific art installation - Hjalti Karlsson's contemporary visual language bears traces of both classical education and the Icelandic storytelling tradition."

Since 2000 Hjalti Karlsson has been working through karlssonwilker design studio in New York.

The prize was awarded at a ceremony in Gothenburg on November 4. During the period November 5, 2013 to February 2, 2014 Hjalti Karlsson showed the separate exhibition "This is how I do it" which is a site-specific installation developed for the Röhsska Museum.

documentary film

In the film A Short Documentary 2013 we meet this year's winners behind the scenes. The film is made by Stavfel production.

Hjalti Karlsson
Hjalti Karlsson founded the award-winning design agency Karlssonwilker in New York in 2000. Client projects span a range of areas: corporate profiling, signage design, wayfinding systems and brand environments, information graphics, motion graphics, exhibition design, book design, web design, product design and advertising. Major projects include branding and interactive design for the Vitra ID chair, creative direction for the information graphics of the redesigned Bloomberg Businessweek, corporate profiling, wayfinding system, website and interactive user interface for the Museum of the Moving Image. Branding and motion graphics for MTV Networks, art direction and design of the youth version of Al Gore's book "Our Choice", information graphics and the design of the cover for Time Magazine's top ten issue at the end of the year. 

KarlssonWilker.com