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.

Posters from Sodankylä film festival

As I mentioned in the previous post, I went to Sodankylä Film Festival this year to make posters. My friend had asked me at least twice previously, but due to the day job and my bad planning-ahead-skills I had not managed to go before. This year I finally did manage to go there and it was definitely a very nice week.

The film festival has a tradition of hand-made posters, maybe even dating back to when the festival was first started 25 years ago. Every day there are some selected showings that need posters done. We usually were warned a few hours in advance, sometimes even the previous day, about which films posters were needed for, and what extra info there might be. Aside from the posters, we also made signage and other lettering.

Everything is done by hand and copy machines, I did bring my laptop along but we only used it for reference. It was very refreshing to work just by hand, since the computer easily becomes the default tool for everything. I did cheat a bit by drawing smaller and enlarging with the copy machine, but I suppose it's analog enough.

This was the first year there was a dedicated poster/graphics team. Besides making the posters, we also went to glue them around the town (which is quite small). The work was nicely paced, there was time to go to see the films also. Apparently the visiting directors also appreciate the custom posters and I heard some of them had asked copies for themselves. That is of course the best feedback a poster artist could get.

The festival itself was great, worth the 15-hour drive (I did have some friends with driving licenses along). As I said, the town is very small, so there's not that much to do besides see movies. It does get quite packed with everyone from the south coming over for the week. There's also a strange feeling of timelessness with the sun being above the horizon all the time, sometimes it's hard to guess the time of day. Most likely we'll return next year for more niceness.

The first image (above) is a detail of a silent film concert poster (3 Chaplin's short films). I heard the conductor had asked for a copy of the poster. Below is the whole poster.

Second poster is for Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western For A Few Dollars More. Mr. Leone obviously wasn't a guest in the festival.

The third poster if for an Italian film by Pietro Marcello, which sounded interesting but that I didn't manage to see unfortunately. The director had also asked for a copy which was nice.

I might have some more lettering photos from the festival somewhere, maybe for the next post.

My girlfriend made some very nice posters too.

Film festival official pages.

Café chalkboard

As I've apologized for the delay between updates before, I won't do it this time. Fortunately I have made some lettering-related things while not updating.

Above is a chalkboard menu for a very nice café in Helsinki, Gran Delicato. This is my first actual chalkboard lettering work. I've been frequenting the café for long time now because of their excellent coffees, bread etc. They know my usual order by heart so I sometimes don't even have to say anything when ordering. The café is not even very close to my place but it's worth the trip anyway.

I tested the chalk drawing on a smaller board the café had, and it didn't work too well, but fortunately the larger board had a better surface for drawing. The small text isn't too stylized since it was a bit clumsy drawing it with the chalk, but the larger headlines match my paper sketches quite well.

The detail photos are cropped from the same image.

I made the board in June after going to Sodankylä Film Festival to draw posters (more on that later), and last week I made some small changes to show some new things that are going to be on the menu. The photos are from the first version.

Gran Delicato on eat.fi