Typographic Workshop

Sanna working on "Tipu"

I took part in a nice typography / lettering workshop on the weekend. The class was organized by Grafia (The Finnish association of graphic designers) and was taught by Mr. Sami Kortemäki of Underware fame.

The theme was "Make the ego bigger" and the assignment was to divide into pairs and make the other person's name into a logotype. I got paired with a friend from the university, Tuukka.

Tuukka's a very nice guy but I initially had some trouble with the double u's and the double k's in his name. But it's not his fault of course. I first tried to find some nice way to draw the letters to one line like in normal text, one result is below. The line from "T" to "u" was added later. Below the logotype are some attempts to handle the double letters in a more intesting way.

I was almost starting to work on the more finished version based on the image above, but then I did make one more sketch with the "uu" and "kk" on different lines. That seemed to work better so I continued in that direction. Next image shows some quick sketches on that idea. The initial and best version is the one that is underlined.

Below is a more finished version that is quite close to the final one.

The final-final drawing can be seen on the wall in the picture below, along with some other logotypes.

And finally there's the Official Photo with Tuukka and his new shiny logotype. Photo and layout by Sami Kortemäki.

Grafia

Sami Kortemäki / Underware

Bossa Nova

This is a headline lettering for a poster my friend requested for his presentation about Bossa Nova music. It was used together with some famous record covers.

The text consists of five separate lines forming the letters. I first drew this by hand to get the basic lines and their relations right, and then scanned it and made a vector version. The colors are of course the same as in the flag of Brazil. Each of the five lines has a separate gradient coloring to keep the look a bit more lively. There are some areas the curves could have been smoothed out a bit more but I like the look in general.

Sodankylä posters II

I had a few more poster-related photos left from Sodankylä, best to put them up too I guess.

The first photo above shows the window of Sodankylä's only permanent movie theatre, Lapinsuu, filled with festival posters. Usually we were supposed to remove the posters as soon as the showings were done, but the full window does look nice in my opinion. I only got to see one screening in Lapinsuu, though: Io sono l'amore. That was quite good. And with stylish title typography.

Another place where the posters were posted was in the fences around the festival area. The photo above is by the entrance to the food & beer tent.

This was our workspace. It was at the end of the festival office corridor, so we had a lot of people come in and ask for the office that they had just passed on the way to our tables. Perhaps we should have made some signs showing the office door.

Above is a small sign made for the doorway of a temporary cinema (which used to be the indoor sporting hall of a school).

And last is a view from the shore beside the festival HQ. It's not quite the midnight sun, but close. The photo was taken 15 minutes before midnight.