Erkki Ruuhinen

In addition his small company has designed logos and visual style for the following companies, products and communities: Ilmarinen Pension Insurance Company, Labsystems Oy, Marja Kurki Design, Garantia Insurance Company, Orion Diagnostica, The City of Helsinki, Helsinki Waterworks, Heureka the Finnish Science Center, Marketing Institute, The Association of Finnish Advertisers, Tampere Hall, Expomark, Pellervo Confederation of Finnish Cooperatives, Turva Insurance Company, WSOY Company Books, Valtra Valmet, Vantaa Energy, Yellow Transport, Crafts Association Taito Group and Taito-Shop retail stores, Find exhibitions of Finnish design held in nine European capitals of culture in 2000, Jyväskylä Educational Consortium and Jyväskylä Institute of Adult Education.

In recognition of his work for Finnish graphic design, Ruuhinen was appointed an Artist Professor in crafts and design in 1996. The National Council for Crafts and Design had never before nominated a graphic designer as Artist Professor.

Visual redesign of Kesko Group and its four retail companies, one of the biggest visual design projects for companies in Finland. In 1993-1994 Erkki Ruuhinen designed the visual style of Kesko Group: K-Nearshop, K-Market, K-Supermarket and Citymarket.

He was the first graphic designer to be nominated Graphic Artist of the Year in 1985. One year later, he was invited to join the world's top society of typographers, The Type Directors Club of New York, as its only Finnish graphic artist member to date. He received the platinum top award in the Top of the Year competition awards in 1986, the competition's highest recognition for a designer whose creative input has influenced the development of the entire field in Finland. He is also the only graphic artist to have received the State Prize for Industrial Design twice, in 1969 and 1989.

At the beginning of his career, he worked with two leading Finnish advertising agencies. In 1983, he founded his own office specializing in graphic design, visual corporate image designing and consultation, Erkki Ruuhinen Design, based in Helsinki.

Internationally, the most notable film posters by Erkki Ruuhinen are two posters designed for the Academy Award winning film Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman in 1982. Numerous versions of the posters and logo have been designed around the world. Jörn Donner has a collection of them. Some of these posters were exhibited in Amos Andersson art gallery in 1993 during the 25th anniversary exhibition of Jörn Donner Productions.

As a youngster, Ruuhinen was interested in calligraphy and type design. While working and studying he developed his skills with book covers, ex libris, logos and monograms. In 1966 he took part in Visual Graphics Corporation's international competition for type design in the USA. Later he took part in several exhibitions of typography and calligraphy in the USA. Several museums have Ruuhinen's calligraphy in their collections, and his work has been published in numerous international publications.

Ruuhinen started his career in type design working for YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company. He designed logos, titles and typography for the YLE TV1 studio even before his studies in Advertising Artist School in 1964. Simultaneously, he studied rhetoric and wrote an essay about the development of Western writing. In 1964 he started teaching calligraphy in the Finnish Folk High School in Helsinki.

Erkki Ruuhinen (born September 3, 1943, in Toivakka, Finland) is the Finnish Graphic Designer and Artist Professor of Design 1996–2001. Erkki Ruuhinen is a Finnish designer specializing in business emblems, logos and designing corporate image systems, i.e. design management.