Creativity is about combining things, breaking the rules, and questioning the status-quo. A broad range of experiences helps, and keeping a humble beginners mind is important. Being an explorer and adventurer at heart, I've gathered many helpful assets in the warehouse of my mind through the years. I work globally, living in Bangkok, and spending summers in beautiful Finland. Scroll down below to read through my story and discover what made me me.
I started the year 2024 by moving to Bangkok, where I help Thai Christian organizations improve their operations, customer experiences, and marketing.
Many Christian schools, churches, ministries, and companies in Thailand are doing important work in bringing hope, meaning, and better life to the poorest in Thailand. Their biggest challenges are usually lack of people, lack of skills, and lack of money.
Using my expertise in service design, marketing, business administration, and user-centric lean thinking I offer these Thai organizations training and guidance.
I received my Master of Business Administration degree from Turku University of Applied Sciences, specializing in Leadership and Service Design.
Because of my work in building Christian unity in Turku through Turku ylistää, the board of TurkuMissio invited me to join them. TurkuMissio is an association of the largest Christian churches in Southwest Finland. We build Christian unity, prayer, and worship, and spreads the gospel in the region.
Turku ylistää organizes Christian events in Turku, Finland. My work as the leader is to build Christian unity and networks, organize worship events, build the brand, and market our events.
We organize worship events once a month in different churches, bringing together up to 130 Christians from different denominations to worship our common God.
I started working as a design consultant through my sole proprietorship Maliranta Design. My regular clients were US based companies Astra Veda LLC and Ballistic Barrier Products. I helped them with service design, UI & UX-design, branding, and marketing.
I'm currently available for hire as a design & marketing consultant.
I had the privilege of pioneering the UX department at Nitro. I planned and built custom user behavior tracking and web analytics solutions to optimize the UX of the websites we built. I also planned and conducted user interviews, surveys, and usability studies.
My passion also led me to function as an internal UX evangelist, spreading user-centered thinking in the company, and so helped facilitate Nitro's UX maturity as a design agency.
I realized the limits of quantitative user research, and understood that true user experience design always requires user testing. I started working with the founder of UsabilityTest.fi, the only company providing remote usability studies with Finnish testers.
I learned both sides of usability testing through being a tester myself and as a web designer hiring UsabilityTest.fi to carry out usability studies I designed for my sites.
I started immersing myself into web analytics and digital advertising by learning Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
The more I studied how user behavior affects the business performance of websites, the more I started to understand the vitality of user-centered thinking in design.
Before this point, I was an aestethics-first kind of a designer, who didn't fully understand that form should always follow function.
Graduated as a Bachelor of Engineering specializing in Digital Media from Turku University of Applied Sciences.
I received multiple certificates of honor during my studies from winning both local and international technology competitions.
Awards and honors received:
We took another partner in our company and transformed it into Pixed Creative Oy. We also opened a photography studio to offer photography services and a rental studio and gear.
As the lead web & graphic designer, I had the pleasure of working with a broad range of organizations from different industries. Many of my clients were associations representing various Finnish industries, but also some major corporations. I designed them websites, visual identities and marketing materials.
Imagine Cup was the worlds largest technology competition with over 350,000 university student participants from over 100 countries. The idea was to build a product and pitch it to a panel of top industry professionals similar to the Shark Tank / Dragon's Den TV show.
We participated with another software product, and I was the UI & graphic designer, marketer, and second presenter of our team.
We achieved:
I started my first business, advertising agency Mainostoimisto Nousu Media, together with my brother. I designed websites, logos, and marketing materials for various organizations.
We won a regional student technology competition with my three friends at the Turku University of Applied Sciences. I was the UI & graphic designer and marketer of our software development team.
Imagine Cup was the worlds largest technology competition with over 325,000 university student participants from over 100 countries. The idea was to build a product and pitch it to a panel of top industry professionals similar to the Shark Tank / Dragon's Den TV show.
I was the UI & graphic designer, and marketer of our software development team.
We achieved:
I started my first professional work in marketing as a graphic and web designer in a company run by students at the Turku University of Applied Sciences. This is where I discovered my entrepreneurial nature.
I received a scholarship for my extracurricular entrepreneurial work in uniting students and local businesses.
My design journey started with graphic design with Jasc PaintShop Pro 5. Through designing Word document styles and logos for my dad's businesses in my pre-teen years I discovered a passion for making things look good and organized.
I also spent a lot of my childhood by fiddling with frame-by-frame animations in Jasc Animation Shop, building websites with Microsoft FrontPage, and developing games with the classic Visual Basic.
