I made a small postcard to promote the opening of a new website for Lucky's, a comic book shop in Vancouver, Canada. It's a nice little shop, we visited it this May while traveling there. The address is in the picture and you can also test the legibility of the text at the same time.

Office Lettering zine

I made a small office lettering -zine from the material on this blog. It's available this weekend from Helsinki Comics Festival small press area and later from somewhere else. I'll update the "later" part later. 20 pages, color.

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.

Tattoo Dictionary in Tate Britain

I was asked to come to Tate Britain in London to make the Tattoo Dictionary. That's pretty nice, I'm not complaining. The show is on this friday evening (June 3rd), welcome if you're around! The photos from the event will go to flickr afterwards.

Street art festival logo proposal

I was recently asked if I could join an upcoming street art festival with my Tattoo Dictionary -project. Unfortunately I had prior commitments that same weekend, so I had to decline. This Monday one of the organizers asked if I could anyway help them out by designing a logo for the festival. I thought I could give it a shot since she said they liked my work. It was due on Friday so there wasn't really time to make multiple proposals.

I thought I'd start with the name of the festival (Suuri Katutaidetapahtuma, The Big Street Art Event in English) since I kind of like long words. I made a few sketches on paper on how the words should look and how they should be divided into lines. I was aiming for a roundish shape. I made a playful word shape with the lines from some letters continuing into others. The line is of uniform width, so the logo would only represent "street art style" and not try to illustrate it directly.

I sent the preliminary logo in for comments, but one of the organizers said it wasn't really what they were looking for. Which isn't really surprising since they didn't tell me what they were looking for. So they'll go on with something else then. But I was quite happy with this version so I'll share it here.

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

Handmade Lettering 41

Happy 2011! Here's another old lettering sample from the office era. "Retrospectives" were meetings where we looked at how things had gone on that "sprint". I'm starting to forget all this, which may be good. Anyway, they were held every two weeks, so I think I still have a lot of unposted lettering scans with the same theme. This reminds me of some sport logos for some reason.

I think I started making a vector version of this one, though I'm not sure where it is now. Maybe it was to check if this works well on a grid. I may post it later if I find it.