February 2012
1 post
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Grids and tits
I’m not sure how old the grids and tits blog is, but it surely does a good job in justifying the point I was making earlier with this project.
January 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Hesarin Grilli and the full circle
There are moments when you know that your life has done a full circle. For me one of those moments happened yesterday. I would have never guessed that one fine day I would be listening a design lecture in London and see my old local “night snack” kiosk Hesarin Grilli displayed on one of the presentation slides. Thank you Dan Hill at The Design of Understanding conference for taking...
12 tags
An evening with Mr Baskerville
As the note states this beauty is Catulli, Tibulli, et Propertii Opera from 1772. The books typesetting is made by John Baskerville. I’m currently working on a self initiated brief at the college, and in order to achieve better understanding on digital type, I decided to focus on the comparison between the digital and analogue typesetting.
First I wanted to find a good example where...
8 tags
Graphical synthesizer
Forget the music, Lydia Sachse and Timo Hinze have made a synthesizer that plays type!
December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is...”
– Paul Rand
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Port issue 4
Our latest issue hit the newsstands a few weeks ago. Don’t worry if you didn’t buy it for Christmas, you can still get it for example here. I think that the issue is an excellent read, and dear I say that it’s not looking too bad either.
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Dot Dot Circle
Both of these brilliant Simian Mobile Discos’s music videos are made by Kate Moross and Alex Sushon. Even after three years of first seeing these I still find myself watching them ever so often. Maybe it’s the dots, maybe it’s the use of strobe light, or perhaps the overall atmosphere, but I think that there’s just something magical going on here. The visuals match...
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Silence in progress
For the last college task before the holidays I took a major challenge in form of Ken Hollings‘ Tiny Orchestra brief. At the first glance it couldn’t have looked more simpler: create a functioning musical instrument from scratch and then demonstrate how to play it. That should not be too hard, right?
However, after reading the reference material and a few more related books I...
November 2011
4 posts
9 tags
Archizines at the Architectural Association
A few weeks ago we visited the AA to see the Archizines exhibition. We saw a great volume of nice magazines (or zines if you like), but not too many new acquaintances though. Out of the publications I had not seen before, I really liked Candide, Face B and Pablo Internacional.
My memory fails me sometimes, especially after pulling a few all-nighters this week, so I can’t remember if I...
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The range of my colour is O
What is colour? is a title for one of the briefs I’m currently working on at the college. We had to choose a single colour to work with, and to research. The one I decided to focus on is a colour we mainly use for attention purposes.
Anyone who has seen a range of my work knows that it’s often quite minimalistic, and the use of colour is usually pretty limited. I tend to bring the...
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“Art schools are turning into businesses
and businesses are turning into art...”
– Question from the audience at Critical Tensions conference in St Bride Library 11. 11. 11
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Revisiting − One Hundred Years of Solitude
This is a dust jacket I made last spring as my Penguin Design Awards entry. The competition brief was to design a contemporary cover for Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even if I quite like the design’s simplicity, looking back now I feel that pushing the idea a little further could have helped to get a better result than zero to none. Phil Baines,...
October 2011
3 posts
10 tags
A trilogy completed
Today we went to see Gary Hustwit’s latest creation Urbanized on its London pre-screening (thanks for the tip Jake). Urbanized follows the great documentaries Helvetica and Objectified, thus completing the trilogy. As a type-nerd I must have watched Helvetica somewhere between fifteen to twenty times, and I really love it. I even forced my parents to watch Helvetica once, but to my great...
6 tags
“I think of design as an act of understanding”
– Ai Weiwei
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Teen girl mode
I had such a good laugh when I discovered the Teen Girl Mode button on Jessica Hische’s portfolio. And how about this clever little url address: jessicahische.is/designing/thebestprojectever. Her blog is also a good read (in a bit more serious way…).
September 2011
3 posts
12 tags
Chronology of a Failure
I took recently part on onlab’s first summer school. The theme of the school was chronology of a failure. The international group of twenty participants were formed from a mix of both practising designers and students. Under the previously mentioned theme our client betterplace lab wanted us to tell the history of the development aid in a new and interesting way.
I am currently...
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Mood Swinger
Mood Swinger is a study on bipolar disorder that my friend Johannes did whilst studying at UDK. He says that the metaphoric installation represents the constant change of mood that the bipolar people are experiencing with their life-long disease. In the piece the red stands for mania and blue for depression.
Personally I think Johannes has found a perfect conceptual answer to a somewhat...
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Past Present Future
It feels like the time just flies by chasing something intangible. But this beautiful minimalistic piece on Berlin’s Linienstraße by the late Félix González-Torres really stopped me on my tracks for a few seconds.
August 2011
3 posts
6 tags
Port issue 3
Hard work pays off (again) and the new issue of Port will reach the newsstands tomorrow. You can read a quick summary of this issue (again) at MagCulture. iPad app to follow.
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A weekend well spent
If you had to choose between spending a weekend enjoying London’s perhaps the last hot days of the summer outdoors, or be boiled in the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre, which option would you pick? Well, call me crazy if you want but I chose the latter.
Of course there’s more to the story than this. Besides boiling indoors, we were making a magazine - in 48 hours that...
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Out of Context
I spend way too much time browsing internet. Especially looking at different design blogs and people’s portfolios. I’ve developed a nice little hobby out of it; in fact I’ve become a virtual collector of other designer’s work. To do this I’m using a website called ffffound!, which is a pretty handy image bookmarking site. Many people use the site to bookmark cool things they like, such as...
July 2011
3 posts
6 tags
Michael Rock Poster
I really like the idea of this Michael Rock lecture poster by Zak Klauck and Jieun Rim for the Yale School of Art.
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Nils Jorgensen
Although I didn’t think that the poorly constructed display at the London Street Photography Festival did justice to Nils Jorgensen’s images, he just got himself a brand new aficionado.
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Fashion & Ampersands
A few months ago I worked with Kuchar Swara at DKM Creative to create an identity for an Italian fashion event Firenze&Fashion. The actual evening took place in Florence in mid June. My part of the job was mainly to concentrate on designing the logo that was to be used as a main element for the identity.
Kuchar wanted the theme of the logo to be build around a strong ampersand. For my...
June 2011
5 posts
Show Time
It’s again the last week(s) of the summer term, which means that the degree shows are here! The past few days we’ve visited many CSM exhibitions among others, but naturally most of my time has gone browsing through the very interesting and inspiring works of this spring’s graphic design graduates.
However having seen students from various disciplines displaying their final...
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On Sale
This is a poster I made for the pop-up shop I mentioned a few posts ago. Instead of the poster I hope to sell my labour. I want to question how much students are actually worth for the industry. The idea came after reading this article by Maribeth Kradel-Weitzel. I’m happy if someone gets interested in my proposal, but my main aim is more to contribute to the ongoing discussion about...
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“It is not only about losing the print workshops – it is about a lack of trust...”
– Max Ackermann about the CSM print workshops. My thoughts exactly!
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Konst & Teknik live presentation
This video by Konst & Teknik guys made me laugh so much that I almost fell off my chair. It’s a really good reminder that this design shit isn’t always so deadly serious (at least it shouldn’t be). The video is a response for AIGA Chicago’s International Small Talks brief.
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An open invitation
If you are in London in June please join us at The CAMP for the Off-Sight Central Saint Martins print protest exhibition and the the BA Graphic Design second year students’ pop-up shop. The exhibition runs from 8th to 21st of June and the pop-up shop is open from Wednesday the 8th to Friday the 10th.
May 2011
4 posts
7 tags
Madre
Madre is a short film by film & music maker Andrew Telling. The film is documenting street artist WordToMother’s trip to Southern Italy. I think the colour scheme and cinematography make this film absolutely beautiful. Content vise street art (a term I’ve somehow kind of come to hate during the recent years) can be a bit meaningless sometimes, but this time it’s surely not...
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Working title: From self-publishing to...
I have recently started the research for my dissertation work. For my topic I chose to investigate why designer’s are often driving their own self-initiated projects, more specifically I will be looking into the publishing side of this phenomena.
By publishing I don’t mean merely printed publications, but also digital environments such as blogs and podcasts. At the moment I’m...
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A small print addiction
As you should know by now I get huge kicks out of printed stuff. I love how paper is something concrete in your hands, every piece of printed matter feels and smells different. If I see a publication I really like I must have it in my private library. A memory simply isn’t enough (especially with my memory), I want to be able to get back to these beauties when ever I want. Call it an...
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PORT issue 2
Wow, a month has passed without any posts, sorry for that. To tell you the truth I’m a bit annoyed by this, since doing an update really doesn’t take that much time. And yes, I’m blaming the work again; the past weeks have been really busy, mainly doing the PORT’s second issue. You can read small taster on MagCulture.
April 2011
5 posts
7 tags
Fanzine frenzy
The 7th annual London Zine Symposium took place today. It seemed that the event was even more popular than last year. By the time I managed got there the place was already so full that moving was nearly impossible. And I’m not saying that as a negative thing!
Since some active CSM students had organised a table I managed to put the last copies of my old fanzine on sale. Maybe it would...
6 tags
A field trip
I remember that as a youngster one the nicest things with the school was to go on a field trip to see something new, like a museum or some weird institution. As you get older you sort of need to organise most of your adventures by yourself.
This time we didn’t need to do much more than sign in and show up. The event was the D&AD awards judging at the beautiful Olympia Exhibition...
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Konemusiikkia
Last night we went to see Felix’s Machines at Village Underground. In Finnish language we have a word called konemusiikki. This word translates to English as electronic music, but the straight translation would stand for machine music. I could describe yesterday’s experience as proper machine music, just look at this instrument!
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PORT magazine for iPad
A few months ago I wrote a bit about a project I was involved in. Well, the work has been ready for some weeks now and the finished application is downloadable from iTunes Store for free. Check out also PORT’s website for more information about the magazine.
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It's all about Wim
The past weeks London has been all about Wim Crouwel. No wonder, since Design Museum is currently hosting a major retrospective of his work. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey (30 March–3 July) is certainly worth a visit – seeing the exhibition last week myself I already have a yearning to go back there to explore his works even more.
But Design Museum isn’t the only place where you can see...
March 2011
7 posts
9 tags
Posters in progress
Here’s a sneak peak of some of the literature inspired posters I’m currently working on. They are for a college brief set by our excellent typography tutor professor Phil Baines.
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City life oddities
One of the best things living in a big city is that you never run out of little weird things that keep amazing. Last weekend me and my friend Jake were out for a walk enjoying the good weather when he suddenly shouted “check out that flat!”. What a nice photo opportunity. I just wonder how that place looks from the inside…
“If you can design one thing, you can design everything”
– Massimo Vignelli
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Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau
Somehow my previous post triggered an urge to look at the work of the late Hungarian master László Moholy-Nagy. I have recently been reading his great book Vision in Motion, but luckily some of his works can be found online as well.
Above video is titled Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau from 1930.The film documents the Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic sculpture made in Berlin, in collaboration...
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Simply beautiful
Thomas Ahlgren is a young Swedish artist currently living in New York. I absolutely fell in love with his dark and dreamlike abstract style.
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Positioning
Sometimes at nights I tend to spend time surfing on different portfolio sites and blogs when I really should already be sleeping. Last night was one of those nights. After coming home from EDO’s inspiring Indie Night I ended up browsing my way to Åbäke’s portfolio message board and I saw an interesting event for today. This event was titled Positioning and took place at the London...
8 tags
Urbaanilegenda album cover
The past weeks have been extremely busy with working. I have been working on a D&AD student awards competition entry, finishing the audio tour brief for college and doing internship works. But no matter how busy you are, there is always a small slot to squeeze in a nice and inspirational brief.
Above album cover is a result of one of those type of works that I just can’t walk passed....
February 2011
4 posts
11 tags
Sound elements
Adding sound to art and design pieces has somehow always fascinated me, but being more visual orientated person I have rarely ended up using audio elements myself. What a stupid excuse, I know! However I must say that I’m very intrigued to use sound, since it brings a totally a new level into the table.
We’ve had a few sound based projects at the college, the recent being under a...
7 tags
An eye for detail - Matthias Heiderich
Matthias Heidrich is a self-taught Berlin based German photographer whose stunning work I keep bumping into every now and then. Matthias has clearly a very trained eye to catch the details, especially when shooting architecture. I absolutely love the graphical language of Matthias’s photos and his often very retroish colour scheme as seen in the pictures displayed below.
If you like...
4 tags
“Design is an ephemeral art similar to cooking, in that it requires the highest...”
– Tanaka Ikko
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A breath of fresh air
Now that I have somewhat settled down in London I find it very interesting to look at the Finnish design scene with outsider’s eyes and see how it evolves in comparison to UK. I have a couple posts in mind relating to that subject matter, but I start with a post about a new multidisciplinary creative agency based in Helsinki. Before we get into speaking about the studio I will write a bit...
January 2011
3 posts
9 tags
My first steps on Digital Publishing
One thing I really love about graphic design is how the design tools and methods we use develop relatively fast, forcing us designers to adapt and learn new tricks. I have lately started to teach myself some basic Flash skills within my college briefs. I’m not saying that Flash is anymore a new invention, but these Flash experiments have been a totally new playground for me coming from more...