ArtovaKino film club Logo

I'm slowly returning from long summer vacations, and it's time to start posting again. I was asked to make a logo / identity for a film club that takes place in autumn in Helsinki. There used to be an active film club tradition in Finland but it's lately been fading away. These guys want to revive it, and that's a very good thing.

I wanted to make something that play with transparency and give an impression of light, like the British Film Institute and Cinémathèque Française logos have. That is naturally very fitting for projected art. I started with some hand-made lettering but I couldn't quite make them work. Eventually I took a more geometrical approach that seemed to work much better in this case.

The logo is formed of lines but their thickness and coloring vary according to application. The basic form with thin black lines is for white backgrounds:

The basic color logo is the headline image of this post. Below it is placed on top of an image, the transparency gives nice effects on the colors.

When the lines grow even thicker, the form turns more abstract. Also, different line thicknesses on the colors break the forms up nicely. The basic form of the letters remains the same.

I'm working on an animation also to be shown before the screenings.

ArtovaKino website.

Grön Ungdom RÅM 2011

This is a new logo I designed for the Swedish Green Party's youth organisation's event taking place this year. It's the 25th anniversary of the event, like it also says in the logo. In addition to the logo, I made a layout template for the information kit.

The visual concept in my mind was to have different shades of green come together for a larger whole. The shades represent the variety of opinions taking part in the event. Every separate "element" is of different color than the previous one.

Official site

Mutu Research Logo

Mutu Research is a new "research company" founded by me. We're still operating mainly in facebook. The logo above is one version of the various logos. Different versions have different mouths and can be used for different purposes. The swash on the right side of the logo of course refers to the glasses all the wise people are wearing. One can also see breasts instead of eyes in the logo, this is also permitted* in the official graphic guidelines.

The logo is not yet really a Registered Trademark so maybe I shouldn't be using the ®, but it looks nice anyway.

Mutu Research in Facebook (in Finnish and English)

* permitted to 18 years old and above.

Kallion kulttuuriverkosto -logo

I live in the Kallio neighborhood of Helsinki and I like the area. It used to be a working-class area and still has a lot of young people and students so it's quite lively. Lots of drunks too of course. It's pretty densely populated, for Helsinki standards at least.

Kallion kulttuuriverkosto (Kallio Cultural Network) is a local organization that arranges events in and near the neighborhood. They had a logo contest, and while I usually don't take part in those, I thought I'd make an exception because it's sort of for the neighborhood and for a non-profit organization. Anyway, I apparently won the contest with the entry pictured here.

Above is a black & white version and below a color one.

The name of the organization is quite long, typical for Finnish language. And I didn't want to have a very long logotype so I had to hyphenate it. Kulttuuriverkosto is a compound word so there was a natural place to cut it. I started building the logo from small vector elements on a grid, a bit like building Legos™®©. First I made the regular letters but then decided there should be some interplay between the letters and lines, so I built some more organic forms in by connecting things to each other.

I put the small circles at the ends of some letters and then started thinking they look a bit like plant seeds. So I figured they can represent the plants growing from the cracks in alphalt, and symbolically maybe some events happening on the streets.

The whole shape of the logo is not confined to a square but instead seems to grow a bit into each direction. That is a symbol for the events taking place in not just Kallio, but around the "edges" as well. Of course, everyone seems to have a bit different definition for where the borders are.

I made this quite quickly so I didn't make optical corrections to the lines (horizontals should be slightly thinner than verticals so they would appear the same visually), but since the shape is sort of complex, that is not the first thing that bothers the eye.

I haven't seen the logo been used that much, and it's usually used quite small. Would be nice to see it used larger too, but maybe they're still practicing. Anyway, I'm quite happy with the result.

Logos

I made some Güüti-logo sketches based on an old typographic idea about there being lots of dots in the word. Here are some rough samples (screenshots from Illustrator): One and Two.