Alvar Aalto Museum website reneval

...again. But for a good reason: there has been changes in the organisation and the museum wanted their front page to show that. Some parts of the site remained the same, like the top two grey-blue navigation bars. The name of the site changed from Alvar Aalto Foundation to Alvar Aalto Museum and the content and hierarchy of the navigation was renewed totally. The front page now carries and photoslider with images of current event, and also, below that, introduction to four main destinations of the museum: the museums both in Jyväskylä and Helsinki, the head quarters of academy in Helsinki and Aalto's own summer house in Muuratsalo.

I designed the new layout and was involved also in drafting the new site hierarchy.

I'm quite pleased to this and quite proud of it, as it was realized in very short time - from scratch to reality!

www.alvaraalto.fi

Tarinakone logo

As the lamb image I designed for Anne's company Tarinakone suddenly proved to be quite good "trademark" itself, Anne decided to renew her logo to fit to it. The logo is now based on both the old design of the word Tarinakone ("Story machine"), with the letters a-n-n-e highlighted, and one of the lambs.

At the same time these designs went into use as her Moo minicards.

The Sketchbook Project

As I seem to live a very computerized life, I deciced to take part to the Sketchbook Project organized by Art House Co-op. The project collected over 28 000 sketchbooks so I was glad that somebody picked just my book at the opening - what are the odds?!

This was totally art therapy project for me, with no higher aims, but since I illustrated and wrote the whole story about A Little Witch Who Knits, I got more and more inspired. I'm waiting for the scanned view of the book - so I can get proper views from it too. Images on this posting are all from "in making" stage.

THE SKETCHBOOK PROJECT ON TOUR:
Brooklyn Art Library February 19-27, 2011 / 103A N. 3rd St., Brooklyn, NY 11211 | Open Tue - Sun / Noon - 8pm / Closed Mondays (L train to edford Ave.)
Austin Museum of Art March 12th, 2011 (during the SXSW festival!) Austin, TX
SPACE Gallery March 30-April 2, 2011 Portland, ME
The Granite Room April 8-9, 2011 Atlanta, GA
Transformer Gallery April 11-30, 2011 Washington, DC
Form/Space Atelier June 10-12, 2011 Seattle, WA
111 Minna Gallery June 18, 2011 San Francisco, CA
Hyde Park Arts Center July 14-17, 2011 Chicago, IL
Full Sail University July 29-July 31, 2011 Winter Park, FL

Pehtoorska blog

"Pehtoorska" aka Anne Kojola contacted me last autumn and we discussed about her website. Pehtoorska is a one woman company, and mostly from hobby base. Anne takes photos of people, nature, events and phenomenons, and she sells her photos and the postcards made from them. After a discussion of her needs and future use and budget, we came to conclusion that maybe the blog would be the best for her purposes. Blogger seemed to be most easiest way to blog, so we chose that. Anne chose the background from free Blogger backgrounds, I designed the header, tweeked the html a bit and made the blog settings for her.

pehtoorska.blogspot.com

Random prints

During August and September 2010 I'll leave a numbered and signed edition of my pigment ink print in envelopes around Europe to random people to find and to keep. I hope that those who find them will fill in a small enquiry to tell me where the prints have ended up. The travels and whereabouts of these images will be seen at http://randomprints.blogspot.com/ this fall.

Tarinakone website & graphic design

Tarinakone is a small one person company that specializes in creating stories for products. Tarinakone is owned by my friend Anne and she wanted to have "something else": not so ordinary website with a lot of information, but something very very simple - not much words but more of those seventies graphic feeling. We had a quite long time when I found hard to catch any ideas because there were so many roads to follow, but finally we found two roads to follow: first of all the lamb and then the next one were the words.

Anne has used a red yarn for demonstrating the story telling - the whole point of her company is to find a red yarn of the basic idea and then bring something extra to it. She had a story of a very sad lamb in mind, who first would be very down with all her wool messed up, then a "waking" lamb noticing that something is happening and lastly a very cheered up lamb with all her red wool on good condition! She had first ordered the designs from another designer and they were a little more traditional comic style which made it hard to include to the seventies inspirated red, black and white design. Then, after thinking what comes to my mind of 70s and those colours (the obvious inspiration is seen on the right side - I'm not gonna even try to cover up that...), I designed three very simple lambs. And from there the whole website design started.

Only, there was not so much to design. Anne wanted to have only three pages with very little information and very strong front page, to which she wanted to put words - so I ended up making this draft for her front page.



www.tarinakone.fi

EDIT: The website has now been renewed to more "wordy" version (not my design).

Website for printmaker Aino Pajari

Aino wanted something fresh (turquoise colour was one of her wishes) and simple, so I designed this really basic site with absolutely no extra fuss aroud. The pages show image details very plainly and by clicking each image there is a introduction of work shown.

The only thing is, though, that the site is still on it's old url at personal.inet.fi/taide/aino-k.pajari, at some kind of "free" account which doesn't support for example ajax or anything like that. Aino will consider new server this autumn.

Jyväskylä Adult Education Centre

I was asked to redesign Jyväskylä Adult Education Centre's website. They wanted something very fresh and joyful - and still informative. The site is using the Jyväskylä City CMS, which itself limits a bit, and the city also has some rules of what can and can't be done. However, when I set my eyes to the logo, I got this idea of "spinning" logos rightaway. There isn't of course any kind of movement really but for me, permission to play with the logo gave a lot to the final design.

It has happened me more than once, that my bright colour scenario has been approved but then after a few meetings everything is toned more subtle or changed to something blue - so I was so glad, when my colour suggestions - all those bright colours - were ok by themselves and that decicion didn't change.

www.jyvaskyla.fi/kansalaisopisto

Exhibition at Galleria Carree, Kuopio

My new series Hiljaisia harhoja / Quiet Mirages will be first seen in the three week exhibition in Galleria Carree, in Kuopio.

This series was quite hard to make for some unknown reason. All the images didn't come out as I had first planned, but I really like the image which is also seen (partly) on the invitation and poster, called Morning Dew.

Lisää väriä

The Lisää väriä ('More colour') is an event for every colour enthusiastic... One day lecture series on Thu June 10 (only in Finnish, though) includes several lectures from colour experts with various backgrounds. The one day colour event on Sat June 12 will hold potato printing workshop + several demonstrations, for example of how to make pigments from earth.

The event is planned by Print Center of Jyväskylä together with textile artist Ulla Lapiolahti and me and at the same time, it's Coloria's 10 year anniversary event.

The poster and the flyers are designed by Meri Tuomi, who was working in Coloria as a trainee for one month.

Program + info (in Finnish) http://www.coloria.net/lisaavaria/

Saarijärvi exhibition

There will be an exhibition of my Poissa - Absent series / installation in Saarijärvi this summer, from next Thursday until the end of August.

With this exhibition everything should be already in order; exhibited images were first shown last summer (so they are already printed), all the tools for setting up are collected in one place ready for use and all details are already cleared with the exhibition place.

I'm quite looking forward to this one.

Badges ---

--- Badges are already sold in the Jyväskylä Art Museum but now they are also available at the Jyväskylä Artists' Society Gallery Becker.
My Etsy shop of colouring images is closed for a while (I haven't got time to upload images) but I'll be tuning up my Monsterium products during the summer. After clearing my desk of zillions of small undone projects.

Uno and Wolmar

Today the net exhibition telling the story of two Finnish notable men, Uno Cygnaeus and Wolmar Schildt, was opened in a very ceremonious event in Jyväskylä University - where I couldn't unfortunately participate. How ever - after a slightly rocky road and verrrrrry tight schedule, the net exhibition was finally set online successfully.

This project has taken my whole spring actually - even though I had dozens of other projects planned as well.

Ellinoora

A light site design for a cultural producer friend who has helped me in many projects and in many roles.

Just an ordinary day

I'm mostly lucky to have clients (I'm quite selective, after all), but some projects make this site feel so real: Clients from Hell.

Somehow I feel a slight dejavu coming from this:

Client: “I didn’t get anything.”

Us: “Sorry, our email is down.”

Client: “Can you just fax me the animated gif so I can see how it looks?”

Us: “Well, it’s about a dozen frames. (Joking) So we’d have to fax it like a flip book.”

Client: “Okay.”

This made me reflect my projects today to the projects ten years ago. I'm getting it easy these days :D

Alvar Aalto Foundation

"Finally" n:o 2.

Grrrr---

Fighting with Aalto Foundation site... I've got some gray hair when I've tried to solve mysterious not-working website with some ajax and some javascript code... After over weeks fight with the front page looking allright and next time uploaded, after a very small code changes, it's complete mosaic - I nearly lost my nerve when the solutions is not just found. Until this day I realized that it's the poor temporary Elisa web hotel I'm using to make this. Coloriasto front page is on the same server (temporarily though, I hope) and I have some time wondered why don't the page load completely even though it's not very heavy page (177Kb). This was both a very reliefing realization but somehow I'm now more frustrated than before. I don't have the time to move the whole site to another testing server since I have so little time and I can't trust in what I see on my screen. So, I just have to go with the Force. With my eyes totally covered and just trusting myself to make this right. Wow.

But after the site is refined I have to move it anyway - I just realized that if it doesn't show itself to me, how will it work with people who want to check it first before publishing. Whoa.

Close my eyes and count to ten...

Jyväskylä Artists' Association

"Finally" n:o 1.
www.jkltaiteilijaseura.net

Jyväskylä Artists' Association site finally up and ready - but unfortunately not in English (at least not yet). This was a much more bigger mission than it probably looks like, since the site holds actually three sites: one for association itself, one for the art gallery with exhibitions and one for the art shop. Each artist of the association has a possibility to add an image/photo and some contact information next to his/her name; I've used accordion scripts to complete that one so that the site isn't too busy. Main page uses three main images: one for gallery is always reserved for on going exhibition; one is for art shop and one for the association. Images are clickable to full view with name and other information.

The update took the whole night and I got to go to bed at about 6am. What a glorious feeling it was to know that the site is up - at least until about 11 am when I went to have a meeting in Live Herring office and found out that the site didn't work at all. After waiting a while and after sending an angry email to web hotel provider I finally got information (this was already afternoon) that there were some kind of trouble with servers which were down. After some time I got a new message that everything is ok now. But it wasn't: they had replaced my new site version with old old old site. Boiling boiling boiling. Some boiling emails later the matter was fixed though.

Hey, mr. Murphy! Hope you had a nice visit here and hopefully I won't hear from you soon.

Ultravox - Thinwall

Oh, Vlad, you say things in your website that I've hoped I had said - just about a million times.

The beginning of the year has started with massive re-design of Alvar Aalto Foundation site - which is not nearly close over. Which makes me a bit anxious.

Also at the working table now are the renewing of Jyväskylä Artist Society site (closer to re-launching than I can bear to think...), english pages for print maker Kirsi Neuvonen and some smaller sites for artists and friends - including Timppa and myself.

And also, the mother of all projects: a massive web exhibition about Uno Cygnaeus and Wolmar Schildt as it is their bicentennary celebration year (from their births if I remember right). Well, not so massive exhibition in contentwise but in realization... Let's see how it will turn out.

I started making some badges already before christmas but since then the time bubble for my own projects just miraculously disappeared. I have to somehow break out from this bubble.

Riiminka product labels

Fast order: a simple two-sided product label design 50mmx90mm for Riiminka.