Kawaii Clara - Thanksgiving

Introducing new series for Coordiration and Marukuki stores:

Kawaii Clara

with a sweet and plentiful starter collection for Thanksgiving.

Panditas

Character, logo and packaging designs - including typography - for candy store Sweet Town's label Panditas (later "Dubbi").

Two large marshmallow bags got made - the "Paratiisivaahto" one above and the "Sydänvaahto" one below (with the blue cloud and the red heart as placeholders for the windows to be left clear on final products). Haven't seen these big bags around anymore in about a year (if anyone sees them somewhere, please let me know), but these little ones Sweet Town has in their own store bare the same graphics (excuse the crappy shot, but kinda exciting to have your package design hanging next to Rovio's Angry Birds *haha*).

Some time after the initial marshmallow bags, this purple licorice marshmallow one appeared in stores, decorated with a black variation of the "Panditas" bear someone had altered from my original illustration (as flattering as it is, this was done without consent, I'm afraid).

Panditas logo and usage guide. Unfortunately this logo never got used in the end - the name got changed before the packages went to production. I would later re-purpose this typeset style for the logo of my 're-imagining' of Lego's Fabuland project.

The actual bags - here you can see the windows in practice as well as the Panditas logo strip on the top of the bag re-designed and replaced by a third party after the name change to Dubbi. The Panditas, "little bears" couple - slightly cowboy themed "bandits".

Sweet Town

Character / brand image, package and ad designs for candy store Sweet Town in 2010. Loved putting these together and did them for the sheer fun of it - if 'actual work' hadn't gotten the best of me at the time I'd loved to have continued with these!

Candy store SweetTown's paper bag. The ship you see floating in the background was modelled after none other than the world's largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas (and her sister Oasis), that was getting build right next door to me on the Perno ship yards in time of this illustration's conception. I've used the ship on numerous other projects afterwards as my go-to backdrop ship (latest of which was for this very recent sailor themed Hello Kitty shirt - the most prominent appearance of it thus far as well).

My biggest regrets with these visually have always been, that I didn't dare redesign the original logo enough - only retouched a bit what someone else had created - and even more, that I didn't replace the used Dom Casual typeset entirely - thought it would be useful to keep to somewhat tie in with the store's existing brand image material, and for the ease of compatibility, if issues arose somewhere along the production line (one of the things you come too aware of working in a house with loads of ads coming in every day, each using their own set of obscure designer fonts).

Sweet Town's current bags, while not my design, still use some of the elements I drew (without consent, I must point out) in a stylistic hodgepodge with other 'clip art'. I do like the new logo typeset much better though. Also have had couple of these 'moments' on public transportation and around the town: nothing more gratifying than seeing your product is getting used *haha*

125 x 90 mm sized ads for newspaper print. As usual with small businesses, there's quite a lot of info to scramble in an affordable ad space. It has it's own certain kind of satisfaction and challenge I've grown to like to get something pretty done of such 'tight mess', and I often compare it to playing Tetris - every piece has to fit in just so without much if any white space to spare.

One of the characters I never got to introduce - a giraffe, I figured would've been well suited to promote the store's high quality. These projects left me with a pretty sizable library of sweets and snacks elements, which I've been yearning to put to some further use. Beginnings of title and box art for "Monkey's Daydream" (chocolate banana candies iirc) and an illustration for a mixed toffees bag.

"Lakrissa" I called the first of the characters I came up with, a liquorice legged cat. Then came "Ape", and "Nuts" was the squirrel's name 'unofficially' (not that any of the names were anyhow 'official' anywhere outside my own head anyway).

Fabuland logo

In 2011 I was musing myself with the thought of revitalization of Lego's Fabuland series.

Though my set and packaging designs remain in unfinished state to this day, I did complete this logo for the series - one which I'm immensely fond of. Also drew few of the characters with a bit more modern touch to be used on box art and 'marketing'.

Photoshop Kids' Edition

Some years ago I dreamed (I mean literally had a dream one night) of this "kids' edition" of Photoshop with trimmed down functions and an interactive, kid-friendly interface with cartoony characters for the drop-down menus. Quickly put together this mockup animation of the menu the next day, but I'd love to try and see some day, how a whole screen of cheerfully cartoonish "Photoshop" might look like.

Online market icons

Set of icons designed for map use and representing the categories on Salon Seudun Sanomat "online market" service some years ago (terminated by now).

SSS.fi interface graphics

Pretty straight forward assignment this: Windows 8 styled icons for SSS.fi interface.

Tilaajapalvelija.fi

Logo, ad, page layout and form designs created for tilaajapalvelija.fi newspaper subscribtions service. Later re-fitted to a more mobile friendly interface with a chance in color scheme as well - for this renewal and the current site, my only contribution was re-designing the logo (though the map graphic you see on the main page was done by me as well, but for a totally different project originally).

Marukuki online store on Zazzle

Graphics for Marukuki store on Zazzle, the other accompanying store for the original Coordiration journal, and currently in need of re-design (again) due to the service providers' change in the base store system, unfortunately. There's that dreaded black gradient looming there on the header image now, that's slowly becoming the plague to more and more of the community sites - flickr, facebook, google+ (death of pastel colored designs that, I'm afraid).

Their recent updates also made obsolete all the work I put on dispaying the store items nicely on subcategories page *dang it*

Should mention it here, if anywhere, that the mostly all too neglected Marukuki blog on the Japanese blogging site yaplog! sports this same gingham style (now, there's a user friendly and widely customizable site, if you ever saw one!).

Marukuki online store on Cafepress

Interface design, graphics and coding for Coordiration by Marukuki online store on Cafepress to match the layout settings of the original Coordiration journal. With interactive, animated menus and changing main page ads.

Frankly, fanciest of my sites design/coding wise, yet so little content. Oh, if only one could combine the store customizability of Cafepress to the product selection and user friendlyness of Zazzle's design tools.

Reminders of an old menu bar on the header and the footer here, that became obsolete after re-categorizing the store.

The original Coordiration journal

My labour of love starting from 2006. The original Coordiration journal (now "Coordiration by Marukuki") on Livejournal, which despite having seen some changes in style over the years still sports the very same pink dotted background as ever. Overtly pink, girly and filled with tiny "web retro" animated gifs - 'mainstreamly' waaay outdated already when the journal started - emulating the journal's thematic style of cute culture itself and the trends set by Japanese and other East Asian youth's blogging sites.

It always takes a while to get anything posted there, as every post needs to be scrutinized for appropriate 'emoticon' and decorative gifs to sprinkle in between sentences and all the accompanying tilbehör.

One thing dearest to my heart with the journal's upkeeping is the ongoing project of improving and adding to the "Francis the bear" mood theme little by little.