No Snow Xmas

When selecting a gift for the holiday season I have always loved this piece of advice:

"Dont make something unless it´s both necessary and useful, but if it´s both necessary and useful, don´t hesitate to make it beautiful"

Some biz-related issues: finally launches of several projects for this year!





- Creative lead for a nicest campaign stuff for a long time for Nokia, a promotion flash campaign, to explain consumers why they need a certain-operatingsystem-powered phones instead of Razors and others. Very nice to do some multimedia for a while.

- Corporate communication design-project for Scandinavian design company. I was a creative lead of the design-project together with and art director colleague.

- Web site concept design project for multinational ship power and power plant corporation. Interesting, long project to learn some cultural differences between Finns and Bangalore-based developers

- A redesign of a site (concept+information design (and appearance)) for local Finnish publishing house. All implementation unfortunately done by some other parties.


Plus several user experience and usability studies, and one interesting user experience test in Stockholm for a Nordic insurace company. Whooah, I really need some break now...

Happy xmas!

Fall in Love

August. September. October. How quickly time passes by. Once again it´s fall. But this time things are different. We got married! After years of living together and so on, we had a lovely reception in Helsinki early September. Many thanks to all our friends who made a day (and night) perfect!

Strong suggestion: once in your life, visit Ile de Mauritius. What a magnificent place to be and live! Unfortunately expensive, we decided not to travel anywhrere at least for a next 6 months or so. Luckily our summer place is somehow winter-proof :-)

Business-related: still working at Satama. New organization. New bosses. Even new ownership (partly) and new CEO. And, eh, new visual idenity. Interesting to see where this company is heading...

I havent had so much challenges in daily business, mostly helping sales guys to meet new and old clients and to pitch several cases. And taking care of some project management in a true global project where we were the design agency and implementation is done... yes... in India! Some challenges, but truly great to learn differences between cultures...

Hope I will have an hys-hys UI development project to run soon. Something else than ordinary online design I do for living.

A Helsinki-based trainging institute asked me to give some lectures about "Digital Marketing Communication Methods and Tactics" later in fall. I guess they have heard me taking at Helsinki Institute of Marketing where I gave serie of lessons about web design.

Any how. Have a great day and remember to smile a lot. Only 72 days till Xmas...

Summertime Blues

Monday. +25 degrees. Feels like Australia to me. Having the worst flu of the year in a worst possible time of the year. Already cancelled my meeting today, worried if I could fly to Stockholm for a client meeting tomorrow or going to Turku School of Economics to lecture on Wednesday...

Talking about more blues, My employer started an extensive restructuring program to speed up reaching its strategic and financial goals. As a consequence of this, they started codetermination negotiations with its personnel. Estimate is the need for workforce reductions to be approximately 50 to 60 persons. Huh.. this means also that my career at Satama is in danger.. any job ideas could be sent to antti@lowreality.com, thanks.

May-June I spent two weeks teaching Digital Media issues at Helsinki School of Economics (http://itp.hse.fi). Pretty nice, even it was my sixth time as visiting professor. I will have one week again later in early July focusing purely on online advertising.

Business side update: finnished all projects I mentioned on March. New ones includes corporate web site redesign for a large design-oriented Finnish (well, international) company. I really liked the visual my visual designer did here, it shuld be online later in September. Also I am concepting a local web portal but only slightly, since it is mostly technical project - but a nice "face-lift" is always good thing, and did some online offering consulting work for my existing (and maybe the best) client. I know I shluld start doing an extensive user experience study for this site but I will start it immediately when this flu feelign is a bit gone, I promise..

Waiting for a summer holiday - short or loooong - depending on negotiations and decisions - on our new summer cottage in southern Finland. It is great place, and it´s hard to believe it´s ours now. Truely magnificient place with over 150 meters of own lakeside and over 2 ha. of forest around it. Maybe the blues is then gone for sunshining...

FIrst Quartal Update

Hello. How are you?

I liked the headline, since my employer recently bought more people, more technology from Quartal. I am quite thrilled to see how two very differrnt organisational cultures will merge. At least this move forces me too to take a closer look for a Microsoft web authoring & publishing.

Currently on to-do list:
- working with a veeeery large intranet information architecture design. Runnig some workshop to make sure IA is well thought and user-focused. In threee languages. Not an easiest task, have to say :-)
- leading a project to create and design corporate multimedia show for a global use. Yeah, Flash is brilliant and I manged to get the best Art Director I know to work with me. This could be a killer case.
- joining brains together with our Director of Ecommerce & Self-service Area to define and design utterly the best online shopping site for a local magazine publisher.

Recently, finished this modest online promotion project for local television channel´s interactive unit. And something more.

On personal level: heading to a spa for a birthday and on Eastern to Copenhagen/Skåne to spend 4 lovely days on southern Sweden. Stay tuned.