Jaakko Suomalainen

“We did this for Swedish House Mafia”

“Cool, lol, haha”

“Hayjaaargh!”

“Wow, that’s so cool”

“As a Swedish dj I respect what they have done. Their sound is really professionally done.”

The response you get from collagues in the fields of type, design, music and fashion might reawake your thinking of what we just did. The common “Helsinki mentality” (note: very subjective) would to think that we just did what someone asked and things just rolled as usual and that’s about it.

But underneath this grey shadow of “It is what it is”, we must live, discover and shatter a tear or two.

As designers of letters we are in touch with the details, the visual construct of the end emotion, but we dont have a clue about the end emotion. We rely on briefs, discussions, mind memories, what we have seen and try to catch what we might see.

“Simple, classic, modernist, clean”, is there space inbetween, or space outside, where to go when someone asks for cleanliness? A whole life spent trying to rip yourself apart from the sterile, simple, clean, dogmatic freedom of modernist purity. Subcultured in american hardcore of the late 80s or mind juggling through a prog revival, all ideas of the simple is beautifull thrown out of the teenagers room.

How to fuse through this? How to dance when all you get is a black t-shirt and black pants? Is someone looming or having the time of their lives regardless?

The merch is sold out already, wait for the next drop.

Typeface: SHM Sans
Designers: Niklas Ekholm & Jaakko Suomalainen
Year: 2025