Viktor Ehrenberg: Just Keep Designing Interesting Stuff
Creative Director
by Elizabeth Lavis
|07 Feb 2025
Viktor Ehrenberg, Creative Director, Jack of all Trades, and Master of None at Ojity, has a pithy and completely actionable piece of advice for aspiring designers: Just keep designing interesting stuff. “Learn the craft. Design stuff. Don’t be afraid to copy,” he says.
Ehrenberg applies the idea of forward momentum and continuously designing to his life. “I strive to be open-minded and constantly change my mind about what inspires me,” he says. I like solving problems. It just makes me tick.”
Ehrenberg comes from the western part of Sweden, a culture that prizes minimalism above all else. Being from the Nordics means always having to challenge yourself not to reduce everything down to almost nothing. Sometimes more is really more,” he says. He learned design through on-the-ground experience. “I started working closely with people who were designers,” he says. “At some point, I just started designing things myself.”
While Ehrenberg’s designs might be intricate and multi-faceted, his approach remains streamlined. “It’s a six-step process. I start by thinking it’s easy, then come up with smart ideas. I begin to understand the challenge more and reject my early ideas, dip into despair, come up with new ideas, then ultimately get shit done.”
"Boras Art Museum", Ojity
He sees strategy and creativity as working in tandem, with one not necessarily leading the other. “I bounce between strategy and creativity all of the time,” Ehrenberg says. “Sometimes strategy feeds design, and sometimes we learn more about the strategy from the process of trying to design something.”
Collaboration and client involvement are two other critical pieces. “I try to keep the clients close and have them onboard for all of the decisions we make,” Ehrenberg says. “When I’m working with a team, we solve challenges together.” He also embraces the challenge of juggling multiple projects, seeing it as a well to fuel his creativity rather than a source of burnout. “I think that working on many things at once is what keeps me curious,” he says. “I have to switch when something becomes boring.” He also refuels his creativity regularly by stepping away from challenging or draining projects for 30 minutes and then revisiting them when his mind is fresh. “When I get back, the energy is usually back too,” Ehrenberg says.
Ehrenburg stays up-to-date on design trends with his voracious appetite for podcasts, Instagram, magazines, and blogs and sees design trending towards more transparency and conscientiousness. “People are more and more interested in how and why things are the way they are,” he says. “We have to start consuming more responsibly, so being transparent in the designs we do is something that will only become more important.”
His top three goals are to take on less boring work, engage with bolder projects, and have more time to reflect. He also wants to keep learning and sharpening his skills on both a professional and personal level. “I plan to do this by throwing myself into things that I, at first, know very little about,” Ehrenberg says.
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