Knight Fight was a buhurt event I arranged as part of Verkkokauppa.com Digimessut event. Most people have no idea what buhurt is, so if interested CHECK THIS.

It was really interesting to be part of managing this little event after I got to make all the graphics (including the front page of Helsingin Sanomat).

I've done quite a lot of stuff for Club Infektio and been tight with the crew all the way back to their first club events in 2011.

Some of my first music photography was taken at their events and even today I still shoot at some of their events. But on top of photography, I've also created some illustrations and done graphic design for them. Here are some of those works during the years working together.

I got almost a completely free playfield with this case. I was to build complete branding including the brand name and the website for a new hair salon for hairstylist Elina Sorri.

She wanted her hair salon to look like straight out of Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter universe and so it needed to look a bit vintage with a touch of magic.

Because she is specialized in colorful hair dyes, my first thoughts were around alchemy and so I end up checking through the internet if the brand name Alkemisti was already reserved or not. There was some sort of media company that had reserved the domain alkemisti.fi, but it seemed like they either had never got into the business at all or had already shut down. Currently, their site is completely down.

To add more Diagon Alley style for the brand, I suggested calling her little salon as "hiuspuoti" which gave a bit more magical vibe. And so she registered her company as Hiuspuoti Alkemisti.

Because she wanted to have a darker-looking website and branding, I decided to go for the proper brand color with nice contrast and antique feeling suitable for alchemy and that is of course gold. I tried tens of different variations, but the top five were all art nouveau style with tons of extra elements I could use on the website and on her boutique windows.

On top of the colors, I decided to add the philosopher's stone symbol below the logo and use it as a favicon. This also added the Harry Potter universe vibe because the philosopher's stone symbols look a lot like the Deadly Hallows symbol.

Alkemisti advertising assets

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At one point my boss said he hated our current business cards because they looked like clothing store price tags and Verkkokauppa.com sells pretty much everything except clothing.

My colleague had just designed some new wall tapestry for the Helsinki store with this new black background and I really liked it, so I took some inspiration for these new business cards. On the wall tapestry there is this big V printed in dark grey.

My idea was to do something similar, but instead of grey color, I wanted to use the spot gloss technique.

Some of the "smaller" work cases I've had are multiple printed banderols and other print media for Verkkokauppa.com.

I've done tons of online banners during my years as a graphic designer and I think they are too small works to have a post of their own. As clients have requested to see some of them I created this great dump of banners.

Do note that some of these banners are also animated GIFs and only work as you click them open. Some are also social feed banners which mean there are no CTA or long copies as those are added to the post itself.

For Mitoro, I've got to do everything for them from their re-branding to their brand new website. In this article, I'm only going through the branding and you can read about the website project HERE.

Originally my job was to only remake their old WordPress website, but as I went through it I quickly noticed that they had close to no branding at all. The only thing keeping everything together was a simple text logo and a photoset they had done years back. So I offered to do the whole re-branding together with the new website.

The heart symbol is simple, but that little symbol alone made a huge impact on their brand making it look more quality hair salon than before. Now also heavily used on their social media it makes it easier to be recognizable even without spelling their name.

Together with their logo they also wanted to use their brand message "Puhdas ja Lempeä", but as it was also the name of one of their services I created a logo version that works together with their services. This has also made it way easier to keep everything together in their advertising materials, but more about that later.

For their typography, I chose something fairly common that will be easy to use and read together with the logo font. People who focus on other than creative things are not always so familiar with downloading and installing custom fonts, so it had to be something already available so they can also use it on their own.

We also removed the old ads from upper windows that completely blocked the sunlight and added the heart symbol to the right window that can be seen far away from the closest tram stop and another heart symbol around the corner that could be also seen far away from the other direction.

Overall I'm always against putting ads on windows tapes because that gives some other brand all the spotlight instead of the company advertising them. You do not want that hair shampoo brand to take all the eyes, instead, you want your own hair salon to be known and remembered.

Hiuspuoti Alkemisti wanted a simple website with a dark theme, but otherwise, I got freehands with this project.

My tool of creation is Oxygen Builder and the chosen CMS is WordPress. I've already grown used to building sites with this combo and because my main focus isn't really building sites, but rather creating content for them I doubt I'll be changing my tool in the recent future.

Because hair salons may have a lot of different services in multiple categories I wanted to build a service menu that will be easy and fast to use. For this I made a categories menu working with haslinks to each category. Together with back to top button, it's really fast to go up and down to check each category.

This is a very simple and easy way to make a really long menu mobile-friendly.

The site also includes two ways to contact Alkemisti. The first and the most traditional one is the contact form for which I used Fluent Forms. It's one of the lightest form plugins available and it's fully editable in Oxygen Builder with OxyExtras add-on that I use anyway for other great features.

The second way to contact is the live chat that can be found from the bottom right corner. For this, I used Tawk.to which is a free chat that can be embedded into any site easily.

Obviously, there's also email, but the phone number was left out for a reason. because Alkemisti has only one hairstylist, it would be hard to serve customers while the phone is ringing. It's much better to have ways to contact that don't disrupt the customer experience.

All professionals have a specialty that they can write about and share their knowledge. It's also a great tool for SEO ranking and a completely free long-term tool to attract new customers.

WordPress is a blog platform originally and when you can write great content, it would be a waste not to add a blog to the site.

Another page that was obvious was "about" page. I tried to make it look glassy and in-brand by not adding too much stuff there.

And lastly, there's the booking page. This is from Timma Pro and all the CSS customization was done on the Timma site and then embedded into an iframe to alkemisti.salon.

This was a fun project overall as I did also the branding, ads, and tons of photography for her. Go check it out and reserve a time for an amazing new hair look!

After I had done the re-branding for Mitoro, I had to also create a new website for them. Their old site was built with WordPress and because it was using a very basic theme and for some reason was using multiple page builders and a whole lot of plugins. The old site can be still checked out with the archive.org way back machine HERE.

The old site didn't just have a confusing construction, but it was also missing branding and there was barely anything actually related to the hairdressing.

Faster and better UX

For the new site, I decided to use Oxygen Builder which is still a fairly new site builder, but it's really lightweight and doesn't have any extra bloat on it.
Minus thing is of course that because Oxygen Builder disables WordPress themes, I'd had to build everything from the ground up. So everything you see on the new site is built by me with one exception on Tehden24 booking that is in an iframe. Personally, I'd like to build a better booking system because Tehden couldn't provide any better booking integration, but Mitoro was also attached to it, so it would have been really expensive to switch everything to some completely different system.

Because it would be really user-unfriendly to put Mitoro owner updating everything with the Oxygen Builder itself, I also added the Advanced Custom Fields plugin allowing them to update the services, prices etc. easily without requiring to contact me every time. Otherwise, there wasn't really anything out of normally used for the site.

Design-wise my plan was to keep things simple and user-friendly. The front page layout came from the client, but otherwise, everything was up to me.
The Black and white theme was the client's request for all the photos on the site, but as the brand uses that bright green I thought I'd rather use saturation 0% filter on images and removing it on hover. Just a little detail that allows adding colored images and still keeping them in the theme.

On the old site services and prices were on separate pages which were really confusing, so I decided to put them both under the services page. I created this fresh-looking menu for service categories that are linked with hashlinks to each service category and then I also added a "back to top" button so it's easy and fast to go there and back again smoothly.
This was also built considering mobile users first.

About Us aka "Mitorolaiset" page and blog was fairly simple without anything out of normal on them. The blog wasn't used much when I built the new site so it didn't have a high priority.

The booking page was also fairly simple as I only had to add some text and an iframe. I would love to make it better, but unfortunately editing anything inside the iframe would be impossible. Maybe at some point, I get to sell and ideas for a new booking system for them. As I'm writing this, I've already heard it has some problems with some mobiles, but unfortunately, it's a bit out of my hands currently.

Overall this was a fun project and it was my first client site built with Oxygen Builder. When writing this I have way more tools to work with and an already built a couple more and even more incoming. Building websites may not be my main niche, but it's slowly growing to be a big part of my work schedule.

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