Everything, on one page

Klas Holmlund

Community, Growth & Marketing Lead · Stockholm · 1994 — 2026

I create communities around games and products using a passionate will to inspire and engage.

I build user ecosystems around products that are new, participatory or difficult to explain. For thirty years I have worked at the point where a new medium arrives and nobody yet knows what to do with it — the first commercial web, pan-European digital campaigns, participatory storytelling, user-generated worlds, and now agentic AI.

The last decade has been community work: building the structures that bring people close enough to an unfamiliar product to understand it, use it, shape it and argue for it. This site is that career laid out along a single line, so you can see both the shape of it and the work itself.

The portfolio is a timeline you travel along, which needs a browser to be any fun. This page is the same thirty years written out flat — for reading quickly, for printing, and for anything reading on your behalf.

klas.holmlund@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Behance · CV as PDF

The Agency Years

Almén Direkt

Art Director · 1995 — 2000 SAS · Telia · Ericsson · Scania · Nordea

In 1995, I started working for Almén Direkt, the Swedish direct marketing and internet chapter of the international Grey advertising agency. I began as an art director's assistant and became an art director working with the world wide web during the dot com era.

A lifelong computer nerd and a 3D illustrator, beginning work at a fledgling web agency during the heyday of the internet era, was a fantastic foot into the world of international advertising. From day one, I got to work with all of the major clients of Almén, which included some of the largest and most influential clients in the advertising scene. I began as a 3D illustrator and animator, but quickly moved on to become an Art Director's assistant. Not long after that, after attending Barry's School of Communication in 1998, I was a digital Art Director. I found that the role of Art Director suited me like a glove. I have the creativity to think outside the box, the curiosity to learn new things, and a natural knack for understanding the needs of the clients I worked for.

215
colors available
12/12
top clients

Berghs

Art Director programme · 1997 — 1998 Design · typography · layout

In 1998, I attended the Berghs School of Communication to learn the craft of art direction and formally become an art director at one of the top agencies in Sweden.

Grey Interactive

Art Director · Digital specialist · 1998 — 2000 The web arrives at the agency

In 2001, after a short adventure in the dot-com startup world, I returned to Grey that had now established Grey Interactive as its interactive part of the agency.

In the aftermath of the Dot-Com Bubble, the advertising world still forged ahead as the cutting edge of interactive media. I was there to be part of it. Again, I got to work with the top clients of the agency, including Ericsson, Nokia, and Telia, but as I grew in seniority, I also was part of almost every major pitch for new clients with the company. In this period, I worked as a full-time consultant for Grey at the onset, but then branched out and started working with other agencies as a contract freelancer. This enabled me to work with new technologies and new media, but Digital was the focus of all of them.

Freelancer

Art Director · Designer · Illustrator · 2001 — 2006 Core network, Bodén & Co

I went out on my own, and quickly found the hard part was not the work but describing it: a decade in, my skill set had grown wider than any single job title could hold.

A decade into my career it had become apparent that my skill set was becoming extremely wide, and the challenge I kept running into was packaging it into a single person. I was no longer just a 3D animator, an art director, a copywriter, a filmmaker, a game designer, an illustrator. I had become a Swiss Army knife of creativity, and I kept learning new stuff. Freelancing can be a taxing process but an extremely rewarding one — you take ownership of what you work on, and you get to try things. The name for all of it came later.

DICE / EA

UX/UI Design Consultant · 2005 Battlefield 2

In 2005, I was approached by Digital Illusions CE, Sweden's legendary game studio who had just been acquired by Electronic Arts.

At the time, I did a lot of work in creating small, fully functional microsites and interactive elements for websites using Adobe Flash. When DICE contacted me and wondered if I could create a menu for them, I happily accepted and assumed they wanted me to create some form of menu for a website or the like. Working at Electronic Arts was a formative experience, and it taught me what to look for in a creative group and the realities and necessities of working in a large, complex project.

OgilvyOne

Art Director, digital · 2006 — 2010 Pan-European and global campaigns

In 2006, I had the wonderful news that I was about to become a father. As a parent, you typically want a bit of stability, so when Ogilvy approached me for the role of art director, I happily accepted.

After a long period of working as a freelancer in different ways, shapes, and forms. It was a bit of a homecoming to again work for an international network agency. OgilvyOne was the direct marketing and interactive arm of the international ad agency Ogilvy & Mather in Sweden. I got to work with the top clients of the agency, adding an interactive component to the 360 advertising campaigns Ogilvy was known for, but the main client I worked with was DHL, where I was one of the two head art directors. The work for DHL was in many parts digital, but I also got to work with direct marketing, email marketing, and general advertising for the client.

Überlancer

Digital Specialist, App Designer · 2009 — 2012 Apps, campaigns, strategy

After Ogilvy, I returned to the world of freelancing, specializing in the new field of app design for iPhone, iPad, and Android phones.

In 2007, while still at Ogilvy, I sent for a special package by courier, opening it with trembling hands. I gazed in awe upon the original iPhone. To me, this fantastic platform represented the promise of creative media reaching the user directly and physically. In the years between 2000, 2009, and 2012, I created, designed, and published a number of applications for several different clients.

AGoodId

Art Director · 2012 — 2013 Responsive web · film · direction

In 2012, I worked as an Art Director at a small advertising agency called AGoodId. I focused on filmmaking and designing responsive websites.

Platforms & People

Plotagon

CMO → Head of Community → Product Owner · 2013 — 2019 Participatory storytelling

Grew the global community around a new creative medium from 32 users to almost 900,000 — and held the marketing and product roles that had to keep up with it.

Plotagon let anyone write a script and watch it become an animated film. That is easy to say and hard to understand, so the community work started as teaching: helping people grasp that they were being handed a medium, not a toy.

For a metaphor I reached for a typewriter — a magical one. It gave a global, largely young audience a way to think about what they were doing: you write, and the writing performs.

Growth from 32 to nearly 900,000 required onboarding, moderation, brand voice and international campaigns built roughly as fast as they were needed. Running Product Ownership and Digital Marketing alongside it meant the feedback loop between creators and the development team was never longer than a conversation.

32 → 900K
community growth over six years
3
overlapping roles: community, product, marketing
Red Dot
Award 2015 · CODiE Most Innovative 2018

Klassförälder.nu

Co-Founder & Community Builder · 2018 — 2020 Cookbooks that fund school trips

In 2019, I founded my first startup, a company with the vision of helping kids make money for their class trips by creating and selling their own cookbooks.

Mekonomen Group

Creative Direction · 2019 — 2020 Promeister VR experience

In 2019, I started a nine-month contract to work in the creative studio of Mekonomen Group, working with brands such as Mekonomen, Promeister, and others. I did a lot of motion design and film creation, but this also constitutes the first major project where I started to explore VR for communication.

Adventure Box

Lead Community Manager · 2020 — 2021 Browser-based UGC platform · 3M+ users

Managed the international community around a browser-based UGC game and platform with more than three million users.

Segmentation did most of the work: creators, players, power users and lapsed members are four different audiences wearing one name, and each needed its own communication and its own reason to come back.

Competitions, partnerships and reward programmes carried retention and reactivation. Community support and CRM were integrated so onboarding and issue resolution stopped being separate conversations, and moderation combined automation, volunteer moderators and clear behavioural standards so the whole thing could scale.

3M+
users on the platform
4
audience segments communicated to separately

Best Laid Plans

Worldbuilding · XR · 2022 — 2025 Mnemo · spatial galleries

Since 2019, I have been actively looking for ways to use extended reality, virtual reality, and augmented reality for games, communication, and marketing. Here are some projects I have created.

Spatial & Agentic

Embark Studios

Community Lead · 2023 — 2024 Unannounced creative sandbox

Led community for WIM, an unreleased UGC platform — a remit that expanded into product evaluation, creator programmes and building player safety from zero.

WIM was invite-only, unannounced and under development. The inherited Discord held ~5,000 people, most of them left over from a discontinued open-source project and silent for a year. It had to be rebuilt around a game nobody was allowed to describe.

The answer was to make the product itself the shared language. Twice-weekly building sessions in the sandbox, dogfooding hard enough to develop kit-bashing techniques, and selecting ambassadors by watching what they actually made — then handing them senior developers, internal playtests and unreleased tools.

The most consequential piece was unplanned. The product had no player-safety function at all. I made the case to leadership, ran the research with Legal across GDPR, COPPA and younger-user scenarios, and designed the moderation UX, policies and escalation model with engineering through implementation.

~20
embedded creator ambassadors, plus ~200 builders
~50
person structured product evaluation sessions
0→1
in-product player-safety function, built from nothing
~80
internal staff + 20 consultants coordinated across

Thespian AB

Co-Founder, Creative Director · 2025 — 2026 AI-assisted performance

An attempt to create a brand new platform for visual storytelling using immersive media

In 2025, together with long-time colleague Chris Kingdon, I embarked on a quest to redefine how stage acting can be achieved by creating Thespian, a virtual reality fully realized theater stage. The project was built around a grant by the European Union and was developing a collaboration with RISE and the Sorbonne University.

Opera

Community Lead, Opera Neon · 2025 — 2026 Agentic AI browser

Built the community ecosystem around Opera Neon — connecting early adopters, founders and power users directly to the people building the product.

Opera Neon is an agentic browser — a product that is genuinely difficult to explain. Most of the work was translation: turning MCP workflows, model releases, browser-aware memory and task systems into things a person could actually try on a Tuesday afternoon.

The Voice of Customer programme became the spine of it. 181 curated insights, triaged for demand and feasibility, carried into Jira on a fixed cadence — then closed back with "You asked, we built" release notes when they shipped. One conversation with a single user led to an unplanned LLM being reprioritised and integrated inside a month.

Reddit was established from zero as an acquisition channel. Community-native content, boosted with a small budget, produced the largest new-user spikes since launch — on a fraction of the main social spend.

181
user insights curated for bi-weekly leadership triage
49
feature launches written, designed and published
3.4M
Reddit impressions from $1,654 spend · $0.09 CPC
>50%
of all product bug reports filed personally

The Future

What comes next · 2026 → A personal note

In my many years as a concept creator and realizer, I have worked in complex situations where knowing what to do next is not always easy. It's been my responsibility to invent and communicate a vision about something that, in many cases, people have never seen before. In so doing, I have had to step out of the comfort zone of established work processes. I've learned a lot during this work, but one of the things I consider most important in understanding how I navigate the challenges of being a creative in this ever-changing world is a poem by French poet and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

We are right now living in a space of time where the playing field is changing rapidly. AI has fundamentally changed how we would work in the future and what creativity means to me. This is exhilarating, and even though I understand that this will mean new ways of thinking and reevaluating your business model, it's still going to be a process of pathfinding, which is a deep passion of mine.

In the future, I hope to join like-minded people and be a part of their team, where we can inspire each other together and build a ship to sail these new seas.