During my first two academic years I was studying concurrently at the University of Helsinki and Mainosgraafikkojen koulu, a traditional school for graphic design. This combination resulted in long, fragmented days which often kept me up around the clock. I spent most of my third academic year in the army, and it was only in the fourth year that was I able to dedicate myself full time to the University.

My major, art history, was the university subject closest to my true love, graphic design and typefaces. My minor was media and communication studies. Even if I hadn’t realised it at the time, it is nothing other than typefaces that merge art and communication in an uncommonly close and natural fashion. In graphic design there was little offered in the way of theories of art and culture, so I figured the combination of these two degrees would prove useful, which it indeed did. To understand styles you need to study both history and theory.

The subject and title of my Master's thesis – postmodern typography – must have been an oddity at the Department of Art History. I like to think I made it easier for my professor by adopting Charles Jencks’ criteria for the nature and characteristics of postmodern architecture as my theoretical framework. Font design and architecture are surprisingly closely related: they are divided into largely identical periods which are expressed in similar forms and proportions. In ancient Rome, typefaces were already intimately bound to architecture, and it was exactly the same in postmodernism, two thousand years later.