Obsession Sessions with Henrik & Sofia - by Ibraheem Youssef

During my time at SidLee in Montréal earlier this year, I was fortunate to be exposed to such a myriad of national and international talent. Among the inspiring people that I encountered, Henrik Leichsenring & Sofia Gillström are one of the few that stood out amongst the crowd. Not only are they extremely cheerful individuals, but they also are a supreme dynamic husband & wife creative duo. Being around them, one can’t help but feel really motivated to be the best version of themselves and aspire to reach constantly new creative heights. Once again, I’m truly grateful to know such creative talents.

I: What’s the earliest memory of a creative activity you did?

S: I remember thinking I could build a robot, I must have been 5 or 6. I made it out of cardboard boxes. I guess I was disappointed when I realized I couldn’t make it walk or talk.

H: I’ve actually tried on something similar. I was about the same age trying to build a helicopter with just one piece of wood and a hammer. I was hammering on that piece of wood for a while until I realized that wood will never fly. I gave up on that and carried on playing with toys not made by me.

I: If you weren’t doing what you do right now, what would you be doing?

HS: We would be inventors. We would hook up with like minded developers and business savvy people and make cool shit happen. In fact, that’s the next step for us I believe. We have a lot of ideas we want to see come to life, you know walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

I: Inspiration, who? what? where?

S: Maybe the most obvious answer right now, but Steve Jobs was an amazing smart and creative person. I guess you don’t appreciate people as much when they’re alive as when they pass away.

H: I get inspired by people around me that is about to move to new places, take on new challenges, getting into the unknown if you will. People taking risks in general inspires me and broadens my mind.

I: Share any of piece your work, recent or old and talk about it.

HS: Mixable Dancer is probably our favorite work up to date mainly because it was an idea we had that we could execute by ourselves in our apartment. It was a cool experience that you could make a lot of buzz on the internet with a simple idea that didn’t cost us more than a rabbit mask to make.

It is basically an interactive YouTube video where the user mixes the song and visual. It has almost 100 000 views today and the reaction on blogs was great and we even got an interview on Underwire (Wired magazine blog). We have a dozen ideas like this waiting to get started on, just need a few more people in our network to make it happen. Good times!

I: Name 5 websites that you check often.

S: Facebook and twitter is the first thing I check, there I have a collection of all my friends cool links. Buzzfeed gives me a daily dose of LOLs and other cool stuff. I get design inspiration from sites like Behance, awwwards and ffffound. Dvice is my favorite site to get insights about technology and some insights for what the future holds. I’m all into fashion and pop culture, and the Nylon blog does a good job of bringing me both.

H: Same here, I get my daily dose of cats out of twitter, Facebook and YouTube like everyone else. Lately I’ve been working on web related projects so I’ve been camping on sites like awwwards, siteinspire, cssdsgn and similar for cool stuff to steal. Lastly I spend a lot of time on feber (fever) a Swedish blog about everything news worthy.