Hey Jacob! Just for the record, could you give a small basic round-up of where you’re
from and how you got involved with Polar?

Originally, I'm from Helsingborg, but then I moved to Malmö when I was around 16 and met Pontus quite soon thereafter. I've been based in Malmö until two years ago. As I remember it, we just started talking in the skate park and he saw some of my drawings, I think. He was like, “oh, I'm starting this brand and if you're interested, you should come and do some drawings, and we could have a look.” Then it was like a long process before anything ever happened, because I was kind of a diamond in the rough, so to say. I had no idea what kind of style I wanted to draw, which is, I guess it’s the same for everyone.

When you start, you just find a bit too much inspiration from other people, and you get pulled in too many different directions. And yeah, since then I've been working with Polar off and on, until now. Well, I still do.

So that’s basically from the start until now.

Yeah, it's cool. It was very rough in the beginning there. It was such a small thing, and you never expected it to become this big.

Would you say that had, and still does have, an impact on what kind of artworks you
were doing or how you thought about creating them? At the beginning for the smaller local brand, and now you know you’re creating an artwork for one of the biggest skate companies in the world.

Yeah, I mean, I think I started a lot more detailed with everything because I never had any thought of redoing things in the computer and making it digital. I was like, “I just scan, and print it on the board.” The whole process of working as an illustrator and doing vector graphics and all of that, it made me simplify things lots of times. Even if I liked more complex drawings, the medium kind of pushed me towards making simpler stuff. Especially if you're making comics, you can't start off too detailed because then you must keep it through like 20 pages of doing the same character.

Pontus had a lot of ideas as well. He pushed me towards that direction as well, which was good, because I had an idea of what I wanted to do but that didn't really fit the Polar brand, so to speak. I had to reshape my drawings to fit the brand as well, which is not at all a bad thing, because it just made me find something that was better and that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise.

Normally people and artists want to be the free bird and find it a problematic thing to
adjust their work to the brand’s likes. Do you really think it’s the opposite?

I think a lot of people do, but maybe they don't want to admit it.

What paved your way to become an illustrator or artist? You said that you started at a really young age. Throughout life and in your youth, there are probably moments when you realize that this is what you want to do?

Yeah. It's hard to say exactly what gave me the drive to do drawings. I was very inspired by skateboard graphics and records, and different cool illustrations, especially in my youth. I don't know if it was the boredom of math and other subjects, that I thought that I had to do something else. I'm not sure if it was that or if I just had a compulsion to draw and try to create something. And once I got going in a way, classmates would be like, “oh, that's a cool drawing!” Then I got this little spark, and I started thinking that it can become something. That just developed the whole time, where it got better and better, I guess. And now it's kind of the opposite. The only time I show drawings to someone is when I'm insecure about something. And usually, I know what's wrong with it, but it's quite an effort to fix it. And then I’m like, “fuck, I wish I hadn't said that because I know it myself.” Then I must sit down and change it.

But I also think it's a very good ability to have that, to see it and sit down and put in work again, because many people just don't want to revisit their work.

Yeah, it's quite hard sometimes. The stuff that you need to change can be the best part of it and the one you put the most effort into, but it's just something that doesn't work with the surroundings or the overall layout. I used to work a lot more by hand and then it was even harder to change stuff. On the computer it's a lot easier to just copy and paste and move stuff around a bit.

That's your own project, right? What is it about?

I mean, it started off because I just wanted to make comics. Basically, just an outlet where I could be more me. There’s some of my stuff that maybe shouldn’t be printed on a bigger company’s product. There's a bit more freedom when it's smaller and a bit underground. The whole project is just something to keep the creativity going as well.

Is it stuff that would make you receive angry messages from moms and dads?

Yeah, death threats, hopefully. If the world is any good, I should be receiving death threats. I mean, I got a few angry messages from angry parents. In one way, I'm happy that people are a bit upset.

When I check the artworks, especially on that blanket that got released through the
spring 25 collection, most of them are about a grotesque product or ads. It creates a vibe of products and ads all the time. I'm just thinking to myself, like into a fictional universe of where this is existing, how would that world and society look if this would become reality?

The whole little worlds that I usually love to build feel like just the prolonging of where we're going. Just that it's been pushed a bit further, where everything is being taken to the extreme. The things that we are upset about now for example, it's totally unimaginable to people maybe 50 years ago. For example, it started out with women being labelled as sluts if they showed their ankle. But now you can be half naked and it's all fine, of course.