An animated logo for Elokuvaharrastus -project (cinema as a hobby) by Koulukino. The project provides tools for making movies for young people. The logo & colors are inspired by older film titles & posters and specifically by the work of Saul Bass. Main typography is hand-made and the other part of the text is adjusted by hand and each letter individually animated.

Some years ago, curator Jens-Maier Rothe invited me to take part in The One Minutes Foundation’s group video exhibition with the theme of spamming.

As I researched the subject, I noticed that the spam emails use a wide variety of letters that superficially look like the common Latin alphabet, but are actually separate letters from many different languages. I decided to document as many of these letters as possible in the video. I found 97 different ones, though the video only has 93. Some are only used in very obscure languages, so the research was quite interesting.

The natural format for this seemed to be a news broadcast, since many spam emails of the time used a similar dramatic language. All of the scrolling texts (and the channel name) in the video are taken directly from spam emails. The letters are shown one by one with the actual information about them at their side. The background is a stock film showing the making of the meat product that gave spam its name.

My current spam folder contents didn't seem to use the same technique to subvert the reader anymore, the algorithms probably have made it obsolete. So, the video also works as a snapshot to a moment in the history of spam.

Kato luontoon - book by Aleksi Tolonen (artworks) and various writers. The process of making the book was opposite in some way compared to usual books. Images of Aleksi’s works were sent to the writers, each of whom chose one (or several in some cases) and wrote a text based on the visuals. The writers range from screenwriters to poets and the texts range from essays to poetry. The book was edited by Mikko Rimminen.

I used Trinité from The Enschede Font Foundry in all texts. Aleksi's imagery is often quite disturbing but at the same time humorous, so I tried to get some of the same mood in the typography. Tight headlines work well and are still readable. I also moved the dots on some headlines, fortunately Finnish language has a lot of them so the effect might even be noticable.

I designed a small visual identity for KAVI's (National Audiovisual Institute of Finland) development program called Uudet lukutaidot (New Literacies). Since the program was about literacy, it made sense to use a typography-based identity elements as well.

After some preliminary sketches I realized that there is a face to be found in Uudet lukutaidot -text and also the Swedish version (English version was not needed). I emphasized the face by adding a mouth (also with a typographical element, and also did an animated version.

In addition, I designed both some characters and patterns that can be used with layouts. The emoji-style simplified faces are built with the letters and symbols of Acumin Pro typeface. The patterns mostly use less elements each than the characters, but also have color.

I was asked to join the Espoo New Year festival for the New Year's Eve 2024, so I made this pixel animation game trailer for a non-existing game. The game is inspired by 80s compilation sport games such as Summer Games & California Games I used to play on Commodore 64. The trailer shows three games: a racing game in Tapiola's main roundabout, tetris in the local landmark building and swimming game in the now-demolished swimming hall. The locations are also shown on a map in the trailer.

The animation was done in Photoshop (for the individual elements) and After Effects (actual animating) and projected on the wall of Tapiola Church for about a week starting on New Year's Eve.

I designed a visual identity for Roxeteer Media, a web development company. The yellow color was already in use and looked nice, so the main thing to figure out was the logo. I ended up with a letter R that multiplies into several copies of itself. This represents both the web pages the company makes and the scale of expertise. And it looks quite nice. The number of R's can even vary since the outcome is still very recognizable. The animation is presented here as a GIF, but it's also possible to recreate it with code.

The City of Espoo started a new festival for visual arts in 2019, and asked me to design the visual identity for it. The Espoo Visual Festival was held in mid-September in Träskända mansion and grounds. Featured artworks were mostly light art, video and installation.

The logo consists of three initials of the festival's name. Letterforms are simple and strong and the "depth" of the letter is the same as the line thickness. The letters can morph from one shape to another (below). The outlined version below is meant only for use in very light backgrounds, otherwise the letters have no outlines.

The background of the logo & other elements is a moving landscape of lines reminiscent of neon lights on a dark blue background. For still image use the designer can choose different moments from the background animation for easy variety, and for videos the motion creates a nice sense of space. The lines can also be on top of images.

Since the idea of the works was to play with the viewing distances, it’s a challenge to present them in other forms than the original prints. Video works decently, so here’s an animated version showing each work with a zoom to/from a selected detail.

The works looked like this on the gallery itself.

The fourth work is a collection of 16 pixelated images from different places, some having to do with the large prints and some unrelated. They were also arranged to a square form. The smaller works were made in a single pixel size each. Animation about the smaller works is below.

The works were a lot of fun to make and show, and the idea worked quite well, in some places even better than I had hoped. Quite many people showed up too, which is always nice. Thanks again to all the visitors!

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.

I had made a music video for the producer duo Koti6 before, and now that they collaborated with the Finnish rapper Jontti (in the album Leipäjono) they asked me to make another one. Jontti’s lyrics are quite political so we decided to use a news broadcast as a visual theme. I borrowed the eye motif from the cover graphics as the “channel identity” (a simplified version below):

We had a nice weather for the video shoot and got all the shots done in one day. Editing, graphics etc. took longer obviously. The editing is purposefully choppy in places and most of the visual effects are not the most subtle either on purpose. For the scrolling news ticker text I used the lyrics and in chorus sections there were additional smaller texts from Jontti & Koti6.

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.

I made an animated short movie about endometriosis. It’s a rather common condition (according to some estimates, about 6-10% of women worldwide are affected) that is still quite unknown to people. The animation was made to raise people’s awareness of endometriosis and to tell about how to recognize the symptoms. The client was Endometrioosiyhdistys ry (The Finnish Endometriosis Association). Only in Finnish, sorry.

The illustrations are by Emmi Jormalainen who was also the co-planner in the project. Music by Teemu Korpipää.

An old style pixel animation illustration for an article about whether it would be possible to win in Biathlon if one was a pacifist and refused to shoot a gun. The article is only in Finnish but I still won’t spoil the outcome. The illustration was inspired by the C64 classic Winter Games. I made short loops in pixel graphics so the files were pretty light and smoothly running, even if the pixel size was quite large. In addition to the animated loops I made some stills featuring the same character.

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.