“Shit happens.” —Brodahl

Thomas Brodahl was born in 1977 in Bergen, Norway. At the age of ten, he moved to Luxembourg, and throughout 1988 to 1996—Brodahl attended a private American International School of Luxembourg. After high school, he applied to the University of Virginia and during these years he began designing and using HTML. The latter resulted in a deep passion for the Internet to-the-point that Brodahl put his formal education on hold to pursue a career in the exciting web design world.

In the year 2000, Brodahl was approached with an idea by Yohan Gingras of evilpupil.com and German Olaya of typo5.com. The idea was to build a “super e-zine”, one that would be constantly updated with design-related content on an unconventional layout. The trio worked frenetically on the concept for two months, and in June of 2000, they launched “Surfstation.lu.” This e-zine became one of the top design portals on the Internet, and still today it is a huge success among a young generation of users. Their traffic report peaked 30,000 unique viewers per day, something memorable. Surfstation continued to grow over time, uniting well-known designers to their team like Jemma Gura, Niko Stumpo, Dmitry Utkin, Mike Young, and others.

Brodahl’s vision for design on the Internet succeeded, his career bloomed, his name known around the globe for his highly popular web creations: Surf.lu and Surfstation.lu. He worked for a small web company “Visual Online” in Luxembourg, and in 2001, he moved to London to work as a freelance designer and illustrator out of his home-office. With personal and commercial ventures blasting off, he’s been fortunate to work with big name clients such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Epitaph Records, MacUser, ComputerArts, MTV, Virgin, Kioken, L’Oreal, and more. He’s been featured in numerous magazines like IdN to Impress (Korea), and has been a guest speaker at international events such as Iconologica, and Firanet in Spain, MadMixer in United States.

...what about his artwork? Brodahl’s style has stood out for its 70s influences—he mixes images of semi-nude women, cars, grunge, typography, bright colors, and lot more juicy stuff. Despite that he started on the web, he’s certainly taken advantage of his skills in print, illustration—and t-shirt design, his items were on sale at “Stolen Shirts”, most recently they can be bought at StatAttack.com.