Ruokangas Guitars

In 2000, I left Razorfish to start a company with a friend. The dot-com bubble burst a year later and our company went with it. I did a few small freelance jobs for old clients. There was not much work and I had more free time than I wanted.

I decided that a new guitar might improve the situation.

A local paper had run a short article about a builder in the next town who made the best guitars in Finland, perhaps in the world. Soon I was standing in a workshop that smelled strongly of cedar, talking to Juha Ruokangas.

I told him his website was crap

Juha had built it himself in Microsoft FrontPage. He was proud of it and thought it compared well with the other guitar makers’ sites.

I told him I was a web designer. I also told him the site was ugly and the usability was, in fairly exact terms, crap.

Juha was unexpectedly offended by my expert assessment. The guitar discussion ended there and I left.

I rang the doorbell again

The guitar fever had not gone anywhere. I thought I might get back inside if I returned with something more useful than an insult.

Juha raised his eyebrows when he saw me, but opened the door. We talked for about four hours. The subjects were guitars, websites, craft, business and whatever else came up.

We have spoken to each other in much the same way ever since.

I showed Juha my best design. He sent me to antique shops.

I worked on layouts day and night and showed Juha what I thought was the best one I had ever made. He did not like it.

He asked me to study heraldry and Art Nouveau, visit antique shops and compare the sound of a cheap car door with an expensive one. I knew by then that I was paying interest on the comments I had made during our first meeting.

The next design was better.

The weekend job took more than a year

It took more than a year. I designed the interface, drew the parts and wrote the front-end and logic while learning Flash.

We called it Guitar Builder and published it in 2002. Guitar forums began filling with screenshots of instruments people had designed. Customers tried combinations they might never have asked about by email.

Ruokangas grew enough to hire an apprentice for the workshop. Jyrki Kostamo is still there and is now one of Finland’s few master guitar builders. Guitar Builder later received a MindTrek award for innovation.

By 2009 I was working at Valve, where I met Juha Javanainen. Everyone calls him Java. He was a very good programmer, a serious guitarist and someone I trusted enough to bring into the project.

I asked whether he would join what I described as an update to the Ruokangas website. Java was starting his own company and took the project through it.

There were already signs that Apple wanted Flash off its devices. I was doing my part in the evenings, and rebuilding Guitar Builder would have meant discarding years of work. Adobe was still enormous and Flash could do things HTML5 could not.

We built the website in WordPress and kept the configurator in Flash. I knew the risk and chose the existing work.

The update grew into a new concept and took another year. Java and I pushed each other hard, with Juha doing the same from the other side of the table.

The site received a Grand One honorary mention for information design.

Guitar Builder was no longer an extra feature. Most Ruokangas guitars were ordered through it. New models shown in the builder and on YouTube could be seen in the sales figures, and the workshop hired more people.

Then Apple stopped supporting Flash.

The downturn reached Finnish digital agencies as well. I survived two rounds of negotiations at Valve and was let go in the third. I had built a reputation as a contrarian, so it was not a complete surprise. Fellowland lasted less than a year. Scoopshot lasted two.

By 2014 I was without a job again. Ruokangas was still there.

I asked Java if there was any platform-independent way to rebuild Guitar Builder. He mentioned, mostly as a joke, that 3D models could perhaps be moved from one platform to another.

This was an absurd amount of work for a company the size of Ruokangas. The technology was still developing and we had just watched the previous platform vanish.

Juha has a habit of taking grand ideas seriously. Once 3D had been mentioned, we were discussing how to make it.

In the summer of 2015 we met Jarno Vesa, an architect and guitarist who had agreed to model the instruments. He knew Ruokangas guitars in detail and had written a book about Finnish guitars.

Juha wanted customers to choose the exact piece of flame birch that would become the top of their instrument.

Flame birch grows in Finland with a twisted grain. Once the wood is planed, heat-treated and finished, the pattern has depth and moves with the light. No two pieces are alike. Some have small faults that affect the price without making the wood any less interesting.

A repeating texture would not do. We needed a growing library of photographed tops, each mapped to the 3D guitar so the customer could see the piece being offered before it was cut.

None of us knew yet how to make that work across a browser, phones and the other platforms on the list.

I had made the previous technical decision by staying close to a tool I already knew. This time Java investigated the options.

Unity was not our first choice. I wanted Guitar Creator to run in a browser and its browser performance was not good enough. Java kept testing as the platform developed.

Eventually the same project could cover iOS, Android and VR. The browser version was possible too, although at first only just. Jarno built the guitars and their options in 3D while Java designed the system that held them together.

By 2023 Guitar Creator was running in the browser without major problems. It looked better than the Flash versions and could finally show the individual flame birch tops.

The architecture had survived the long build. Maintaining it was becoming too much work for the only developer who understood all of it.

A configurator could answer questions about woods, colours and hardware. It could not explain why somebody would wait for a handmade instrument or what the right guitar can do to a player.

While Guitar Creator was being rebuilt, so was the rest of the site. We rewrote the content, photographed the instruments and made films with players who had built part of their musical lives around them. The work took us to the United States and Germany as well as studios and stages in Finland.

The models received their own films and music. Thousands of photographs went into the site and the configurator. Matti, Markus, Mika, Nina, Emma, Antti and the rest of the team are credited below because this part could never have been made by two people sitting at computers.

The website and Guitar Creator received awards for UX, photography, copywriting and information design. They are listed below. Customers are still using Guitar Creator to order guitars.

The question Juha was answering by email in 2001 has not changed much: what will my choices look like when they become one guitar?

The first Guitar Builder answered with drawings. When Flash disappeared, 3D gave us a chance to show the instrument and its wood more accurately. When the Unity project became too difficult to maintain in one developer’s spare time, AI helped me understand the system well enough to finish it and rebuild the lighting while I was there.

None of those versions came from a clean plan. Java’s architecture is still underneath the current one. Jarno’s models are there, along with Juha’s knowledge of every part and the work of the people who photographed, filmed, wrote, played and tested it.

Back in the studio, I was pleased that the AI had worked. Looking at the guitar on the screen, I could also see how much of it had been made long before the AI arrived.

I do not know how many digital-product client relationships last twenty-five years. I have not had another one. Ours did not continue because the work went smoothly. Quite a lot of it did not.

Juha could have stopped calling. I could have stopped ringing the doorbell. Neither happened.