Hey there! My name is Bård Edlund, and EDLUNDART is the less-than-catchy name of my New York City creative studio. Think of it as a boutique agency; I can help you connect with an audience in interesting and entertaining ways through animated videos, data visualizations, and various kinds of design. The companies and organizations listed above are just some of the many great clients for whom I have designed, directed and animated.
With six years of experience as an Art Director at CNN, and two decades spent in and around digitally focused newsrooms, I'm a natural fit for all sorts of editorial projects — but I love working on everything from explainer animations to apps and websites to kiosk displays, music videos, films, posters, books, advertising, and anything else that can benefit from a clever, creative touch. I'm a firm believer in the strangely controversial idea that most creative fields are interrelated in a way that makes, or at least can make, this diversification an asset. And, I like learning new things and bringing my design sensibility to various arenas.
Bård Edlund is a thoughtful designer who really understands and cares about data — using it responsibly and presenting it beautifully. He adeptly worked with our team through several design iterations and provided insights that led us to the right data visualization for our organization.
Ryan Stubbs
Research Director
National Assembly
of State Arts Agencies
We commissioned Bård to produce a series of creative, animated explainer videos, and we couldn't have been happier with the work he did for us. It was colorful, inventive and joyful. And, he was a pleasure to work with, whether the discussion revolved around editorial questions or business process.
Matt Rivera
Senior Producer
NBC News
Bård is one of the most skilled designers I've had the pleasure of working with.
He has an innate sense of the digital space and the solutions he comes up with are immensely creative, insightful, analytical and precise. He's extremely passionate about his craft and super fun to work with!
Andrew Bergmann
Executive Creative Director
CNN
Since taking EDLUNDART full-time in 2012 I have been fortunate to work with interesting clients, large and small, on a great variety of assignments. My projects have been written up on the sites of BuzzFeed, Fast Company, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, Digg, Flowing Data, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, Gawker, GOOD Magazine, The Awl, The Hollywood Reporter, Cinema Blend, Launch, Swissmiss, and Kottke.org, among many others. Additionally, my pieces have been exhibited at the legendary Droog Gallery in Amsterdam, the Time Warner Center in New York, and the hilariously named Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, Texas. I was a Loeb Award finalist in 2014.
My latest projects include motion design for a Wall Street Journal documentary film about the business impact of COVID-19, animated Instagram loops for Stack Overflow, an environmental responsibility animation for PepsiCo, editable motion graphics templates for Fortune, an animation for DJI about using drones to locate unexploded land mines, photo book design for Doctors Without Borders, and a print calendar design for CancerCare.
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Animation Project Highlights
I'm available for freelance work around the globe, from my base in New York City, or I can join forces with your team temporarily — or even permanently, if the role is just right and your goal is to create something exceptional, ideally in New York or Los Angeles.
If you have a project you want to discuss with me, email reception@edlundart.com or check in on Twitter. I'm @edlundart there, and just about everywhere else online, too.
I was born and raised in Oslo, the capital of Norway, where I began my career as a writer for IDG's Computerworld and Multimediaworld magazines. I left Scandinavia upon acceptance to The Maryland Institute, College of Art — one of the highest-ranked art schools in the U.S., from which I graduated with honors, a very strange haircut, a semi-famous personal website, and a BFA in illustration. I did artwork for publications ranging from Texas Monthly to YM Magazine, before moving to New York in 2000 for a job as a designer with CNN. 12 years later I quit my job as Art Director, and started making strange and wonderful things for clients and for myself.
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Design Project Highlights
More information about some of the work I've done over the last few years: For Vox.com and Veterans Coming Home, a public media initiative made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I animated a video about the growing military-civilian divide. It passed 2 million views on Facebook, with around 50,000 shares, facilitating an interesting and passionate discussion about a difficult topic.
I was the designer and animator on the documentary feature film American Anarchist by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Charlie Siskel (Finding Vivian Maier). The film, which is centered on the reclusive writer of "The Anarchist Cookbook," premiered at the Venice Film Festival before hitting theaters in the U.S. and then streaming on Netflix.
For Doctors Without Borders, I contributed animated scenes for a video explaining an open collaborative approach to conducting tuberculosis drug development. I've also designed several images for their various campaigns, some of which have been used on social media, while others have been printed on trucks and pedicabs (!) or used as posters. And, I designed a 90-page photo book documenting 20 years of their important work in Nairobi, Kenya.
Another favorite project is a series of explainer videos for NBC News — each based on a phone interview with an expert — about different aspects of the 2016 Presidential race. Of course, I doubt any of the people interviewed quite imagined what we were in store for...
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Visualization Project Highlights
An animated visualization I did for CNNMoney (now CNN Business) inventively shows the evolution of new single-family homes in America over the last 40 years. The piece was featured on Digg, FlowingData, Kottke.org, FastCo.Design, Yahoo! Homes, Curbed, and on Architect, Good Housekeeping, and many other sites.
Ahead of the 2015 Oscars ceremony, one of the big stories was the lack of diversity among the nominees. For a self-released animated infographic, I looked at the nominations for Black, Hispanic and Asian people throughout the history of the Academy Awards, and animated marbles coming together to form an Oscar statuette to represent the racial disparity of winners in the top categories. The resulting video was featured on Salon and BuzzFeed, as well as DesignTAXI, Kottke.org and both Co.Design and Co.Create at Fast Company. A 2016 update with new data received a new round of press and was acquired by Free Speech TV (home of "Democracy Now!") and shown as an interstitial in the days leading up to the ceremony.
I also conceived and designed an animated visualization called Sixty Seconds of Salary, which was published by my former employer CNNMoney and shown on CNN. It was shared over 7,000 times on Facebook and generated well over 2,000 tweets. The piece shows salaries accumulating second by second, dramatically comparing the incomes of Kobe Bryant, then-ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a teacher, and a minimum wage earner, among others. The narrated animation was written up on several sites, including Popular Science, digg and Co.Design, and was selected to be part of an exclusive Time Warner exhibition in New York organized in association with Future of Storytelling — after which it was also linked on Swissmiss. At the end of 2013, The Wire (The Atlantic's news service) named the piece one of the best visualizations of the year. In the spring of 2014, it was nominated for a Loeb Award.
Going back even further, another project that got a fair bit of attention was Stanley Cup Summed Up, a unique ambient animated data visualization covered by CBS Sports, CBC, Gizmodo, BuzzFeed, FlowingData, Yahoo!, Fast Company's Co.Design, and many other sites. Deadspin later named it one of The 10 Best Sports Infographics of 2012.
One of the quirkiest finance-related design projects you'll ever see is Market Music, where S&P 500 data is turned into a reggae song synced to animated 3D visuals. Like several of my data visualization pieces, it was named Infographic of the Day over at Co.Design. Even more exciting was its inclusion in a show called Dataism at the Droog Gallery in Amsterdam. The piece is also being used as an example of creativity and innovation in data visualization in the extensive Lynda.com visualization course by Bill Shander.
One of the first things I completed after going solo was an animated short film called Franklin the Ladies' Cat, successfully funded on Kickstarter. I turned it into a short series which was featured on Cartoon Brew. The second installment was a finalist in the online category of the 2013 Holland Animation Film Festival. My 2008 animated short film "Gone" is being shown in classes at Santa Fe University of Art and Design as well as The University of Wales.
While I'm first and foremost a visual artist, I'm also deeply interested in music, and regularly write and record songs — a few of which have been used in popular shows on IFC, NBC, MTV, Bravo, Viceland, BET, Nat Geo, Discovery, Lifetime, Comedy Central, Netflix, Hulu, We, SPEED, Fuel TV, TLC, Fox Sports, CMTV, MSNBC, OWN, Logo and Telemundo. If you're a producer or music supervisor, many of my songs are currently available in the Jingle Punks library under the name 'edlundart'. I'm available for custom compositions for apps/games, films, TV, etc.
This website has been online in one form or another since 1995. During all this time, I have not improved at all as a dancer, and my cooking skills remain embarrassing. If you read this far, you should probably just go ahead and follow me on Twitter. I ramble even more there. And brag less.