Book of Hours is a book by photographer Ida Pimenoff with her photography and writing. I’ve known Ida for a long time, and was very happy she asked me to design the book with her. The form of the book was changing along the process but finally turned out to be quite close to an idea we spoke of early in the making of the book; a notebook with a feeling of everyday.

There are two different covers, both are shots of the same cloud taken moments apart, so the impression is similar but not identical. There are folds in both front and back covers there the cover image continues. The paper is Lessebo Design, which feels very nice and smooth in the fingers.

The book is bound with swiss binding, so the spreads open (almost) completely. The images can be seen completely and the fold doesn’t hide them.

Many of the images are shot in panoramic format so the book shape was built around them, with some flexibility for other formats. At times the editing of the book felt a lot like editing a film because of the cinema-like quality of many shots.

With smaller images and texts I paid a lot of attention to the interplay of the elements within the spreads and also from one spread to the next.

The only typeface used in the book is Minion Pro, a common font that is nevertheless very well done and quite friendly and familiar in appearance. The typeface is designed with different versions for different text sizes, many of which were in use in the texts.

Book of Hours, like Ida’s earlier books, was published by Kehrer Verlag. Here’s a flip-through video of the book.

Media-avain (Media Key in english, though the site is only in Finnish for now) is a web-based service giving parents more accurate tools to estimate the suitability of media (movies etc.) for kids, compared to only loooking at the age ratings. It also provides advice for discussion.

I designed the logotype for the service and since they deal with and advertise in movies, it made sense to have an animated version also. The symbol itself is a bit cryptic and gives room for interpretation. It also includes the initial letters of the words Media and Avain, but it’s not immediately obvious when seen without the other text. The colors come from the rating colors used on the site, blending together for more tones.

-…………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.

Retro pixel graphic animations in Commodore 64-style were needed for a finnish TV advertisement for RAY, so Anima Boutique asked me to do them. The clips are pretty short since they were cut between live-action footage, but the Vimeo clip linked has a helpful slow motion replay of each. I drew the elements in actual C64 pixel dimensions (well, actually cropped a bit from top and bottom since screens are different shaped nowadays) and scaled them up at the end.

Note the small light points in the darkened room.

The locations in this clip are Säynätsalo Town Hall (designed by Alvar Aalto), a random suburb motorway interchange and the Senate Square of Helsinki with the cathedral on the background.

The tennis girl was redrawn even smaller so the pixel size is doubled from the other clips.

A logo I made for a friend’s florist business in Spokane, Washington, USA. The typography is handmade, starting from pencil sketches and ending up in clean vector forms. The shapes continue from letter to letter and interact. An animated version playing with the connections is in the video above. Below is an optically corrected version.