Donna is a 10-episode Finnish romantic comedy TV series starring Alina Tomnikov. I made the graphic identity for the series including title sequence and other elements.

The main character of the series is blind, so this was an important element to convey visually somehow. Of course black screen could have been a bit too minimalistic, so I thought of using hand-drawn circles as a graphic element. They look like the bokeh of camera lens (the circles light sources make when they are out of focus) and the vibration hand-drawn ones were making looked quite nice. There are some in the background in the title sequence, and another example is below.

Of course there needs to be text too, and since the hand-drawn look seemed to work on the circles I decided to use a similar approach on the texts. The hand-drawn title seems a bit light when seen in a still form but works well in motion (below) and of course when composed over images. The drawing was done frame-by-frame in Photoshop, with only the previous frame as the guide. This resulted in a small drift of the letters which is nicely lively.

I did test the actors’ names with the same technique too, but that turned out to be a bit too hectic effect when combined with images. However, I can obviously post them here as a small bonus feature.

The title sequence above is not the final one but almost, colors were fine-tuned by the post-production company. You can check out the series in Yle Areena (might only work in Finland though) and the crew & other info in IMDb.

A fun little typography/lettering job: I was asked to make the logo for Suomalainen kuoronjohtajakilpailu (the Finnish choir conductor competition) and came up with this solution. All letters form a rising shape that can refer to singing. The original letterforms were hand-lettered and subsequently cleaned up a bit (but not too much to maintain some irregularity which I like). Some letters react to each other both horizontally and vertically so the logo is quite lively. The event poster I also designed is below.

Talouselämä is one of the major economy magazines in Finland. They publish an annual Top 500 companies in Finland -issue and wanted me to design the number 500 for this year’s cover.

After some sketching we decided to go for the isometric perspective look. The text “500” itself isn’t typographically the most interesting, since two out of three numbers are the same, but the “extra dimension” in the perspective gave it some more possibilities. I made some cubes and piled them up for the basic forms, which were then refined further. After the forms were for the most part ready I added some details in “impossible perspective”, so the letters could be seen as from two different viewpoints. It’s a small detail but a nice added bonus, if someone spots it.  The red color is the main color of the magazine and the gray tones are also used frequently.

A logo designed for a new Finnish Photobook Award (http://photobookaward.fi/) that’s being awarded for the first time in 2017.

The symbol is a mix of books’ pages and a shutter. I personally like the symmetry of it quite a lot. The type is custom-made, all the A’s are missing the horizontal line so they’d look a bit like books from the side. The lines of the letters also continue between different letters on the same or next lines, where possible without it being too attention-grabbing.

-…………0+ is a self-published collection of writings by Maija. I edited and designed the zine from a larger collection of writings originally published in Maija’s Facebook page. The text is very abstract, so while designing the layout I was mostly working to make the text appear visually interesting instead of a conventional layout process.