How I ended up doing this

In 1998 I was working in a warehouse outside Helsinki — loading goods, organising shelves, the kind of job where one day is indistinguishable from the next. I’d been to art school. None of that mattered in there.

Then Janne Aaltonen called.

Janne and I went back a while before that. We’d made logos and posters for a band together, and spent a lot of nights at a Commodore 64 — he wrote the code, I sat next to him and threw out ideas. A year or so earlier, when he was broke and needed to get to a job interview, I’d lent him a hundred markka — Finland’s currency before the euro, and not a large sum even then. He got the job, at a new web agency called Spray Interactive.

Now he was calling to offer me a way out. “Come and work at Spray,” he said. “I’ll teach you everything.” I said yes before I’d worked out whether I actually believed I could do it.

Three months to prove it

Spray had arrived in Finland in 1997, one of a handful of agencies at the time convinced, loudly, that the internet was going to change everything — which, to be fair, it did. It became Razorfish not long after I started. The office was full of people who spoke code like a first language and saw design in things I only saw as pixels. I could barely use email without someone showing me how.

I had three months of probation to prove I wasn’t a mistake. I worked constantly — weekends stopped meaning anything — and spent most of it fairly sure I was about to be found out. Janne was patient, but I could see him wondering whether bringing me in had been a good idea.

I wasn’t fast. I was fast enough.

Peugeot, then Fortum

My first project of my own was Peugeot.fi. Not glamorous, but mine, with a client who had real money riding on it. It went well, and for the first time since the warehouse I felt something other than dread.

Then came Fortum — at the time, probably the biggest project running in the country, big enough to swallow a whole team and spit people out exhausted. I didn’t think I was ready. Janne told me I was, in about four words, and I took the job mostly because he said so. It finished late, several of us slept on the office sofa more than we’d admit, and it won awards. Nobody asked anymore whether taking me on had been a mistake. Not even me, most days.

The balcony

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and I watched a company that had genuinely cared about building something turn into one that mostly talked about invoicing. Clients who used to ask about vision started asking about price first. Janne — who’d always found the upside in anything — started looking tired in meetings, and some days I’d find him on the office balcony, not saying much. We all knew what that meant. By the time Razorfish filed for bankruptcy, the version of it that had hired me was already long gone.

Starting again, in 2001

“Let’s go,” Janne said one evening in the empty office. He meant: let’s start our own company. 2001 was not a sensible year to do that — most of the industry we knew was busy collapsing — but we’d already done a few mad things together, so we did this one too.

Aaltonen & Vuorela started as two men, two computers, and a borrowed corner of someone else’s office. Janne, who I’d only ever known as the quiet coder, turned out to sell faster than either of us expected — Red Bull, Trainers’ House, Elämystaikurit, Suomi-Yhtiöt, names we hadn’t let ourselves plan for. Razorfish went under not long after we left — close enough that we noticed.

By our first anniversary we’d billed a million markka and were hiring. It felt like the thing was actually working.

Minka

My daughter was born in the middle of all that growth. Holding her for the first time, the company suddenly felt like a much smaller thing.

Running it took most of my mornings, evenings and attention. So did she. For a while I wasn’t fully present in either place.

Mannerheimintie

The partnership went wrong slowly — the kind of disagreement you can ignore for a while, until you can’t. We’d just moved into an office on Mannerheimintie, in the centre of Helsinki, with a view of the Three Smiths statue — the kind of address we’d once treated as proof we’d made it. Standing at that window should have felt like arriving. Instead it felt like the wrong moment to be ending something.

“We have to end this,” Janne said, and he was right, even though neither of us had done much wrong. We were good at different things, and by then those things were pulling in different directions. We split the company by the end of 2002. Neither of us kept it running.

I spent a while afterward doubting most of what I thought I’d learned — a feeling I recognised from the warehouse, and from the week before Fortum. It turned out to be wrong again: what came right after the split was, by a distance, the most successful run of work I’d had up to that point. That one was Ruokangas.

Valve, and the years after

I worked alone for a while after the split, until the phone rang again. It was a former Razorfish colleague this time, asking if I’d be interested in a job at Valve — one of the more decorated digital agencies in Finland back then. I stayed over five years, long enough to pick up a Grand One award in 2009, before moving to Fellowland — a company some old Valve colleagues had started — as a user experience designer, from October 2011 to September 2012. After that came Scoopshot, a startup I’ve written about separately, in its own case study.

After Scoopshot, I went independent around 2014. Since March 2017 I’ve worked under my own name, junnu.

Today

I’m based in Helsinki. The honest version of my job title is “senior UX/UI designer and product clarity consultant,” which is a longer string of words than the job actually needs. What I actually do is make products make sense.

Most of what I’m asked to look at isn’t broken. It works — someone built it carefully. But somewhere between the founder’s head and the screen, the point got lost, and the team ends up arguing about button colours when the real problem is that nobody can say, in one sentence, what the product is for. That’s usually where I start.

I didn’t plan to become a generalist. I just kept ending up in situations where fixing the interface wasn’t enough. Sometimes the problem was the product. Sometimes it was the words. Quite often it was all three at once. Job titles stopped being useful a while ago. The problem rarely cared what my title was.

These days it’s mostly founders and small product teams — usually past their first version, working out that the second one needs to be understood, not just built.

Fourteen industry awards came along the way — Mindtrek, Grand One, FWA, and eleven others I’ll spare you the list of. None of them fixed the sentence problem either.

That’s the long version. If you’ve read this far, you already know more about how I ended up doing this than most people who hire me do. If it’s useful to talk, you know where to find me.