I've never been good at estimating dimensions. Ask me how tall a building is and I'll say "building-sized." Show me a room and I'll tell you it's "couch plus some walking space." This shortcoming caught up with me in the fall of 2014, standing in Copenhagen's Town Hall Square, staring up at a 26-meter display that was playing our animation. Upside down.

The Lysavisen has been wrapping around the Politiken building since 1928. That's nearly a century of news tickers, weather updates, and the occasional advertisement cycling past Copenhagen commuters. At 2.8 by 26 meters — roughly 9 feet by 85 feet — it's Denmark's largest LED screen. We'd been hired to make it say something about Jägermeister.

The job came through Virtue, Vice's creative agency. At the time, they were running campaigns that felt less like advertising and more like cultural moments. The Jägermeister brief wasn't complicated: animated content that could hold its own against a hundred years of Copenhagen history scrolling across that display.

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Working at this scale is different from working on screens that fit on desks.

Our usual process involves pixels we can count. Interfaces that respond to a fingertip. Experiences contained within the boundaries of a phone, a tablet, a browser window. The Lysavisen asked for something wider than our entire Brooklyn office.

The technical specs forced compromise. At 1792 by 224 pixels, you're not working with the fidelity of even a decent laptop screen — you're working with constraints that haven't fundamentally changed since display technology was measured in light bulbs. We had to stitch two separate animations together to achieve the full width. File size limits. Frame rate caps. Color behavior that an LED array from a historic building interprets differently than Photoshop promises.

The work itself was straightforward enough once we understood the boundaries. But there's something about seeing your files leave the controlled environment of your workstation and appear on the side of a building that recalibrates your sense of what "production" means.

Everything was ready. We sent the files. They went live.

Then my phone rang.

"It looks great," the client said. "But it's upside down."

I still don't know exactly what happened.

Somewhere between our delivery and the display's rendering, the animation appeared inverted. Whether it was a metadata flag, a system default, or something in the historic display's interpretation of the file — we never got a clear answer. What we got was a five-minute fix and a reminder that working at scale means working with systems you don't fully control.

Eighty-five feet of Jägermeister content, rotated 180 degrees on the side of a Copenhagen landmark. A rotation setting, adjusted remotely. The kind of problem that reveals how much of this work happens in the space between technical precision and handoff chaos.

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We've worked on plenty of projects since. Kiosk interfaces for museums. Interactive installations that respond to touch, to motion, to presence. Digital experiences where we control every pixel from concept to deployment.

But I still think about the Lysavisen when scope starts expanding beyond comfortable territory. Not because we failed — we fixed it in five minutes — but because it taught me something about the gap between what we design and what appears in the world.

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Scale introduces chaos. The larger the canvas, the more opportunities for things to rotate unexpectedly. The best you can do is build systems that respond quickly when they do.

And maybe double-check the orientation before you celebrate.

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Working on something at a scale that makes you nervous? Let's talk.