My first memories are of the warm colors of a CRT display; we were playing the great LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. On top of all the stories, gorgeous graphics, and inventive puzzles, a thing I remember fondly is the beeps and boops of the PC speaker. One Christmas, a whole new world opened to me when I got my first audio card, the good old Sound Blaster AWE 32. Suddenly, I could hear a polyphony of instruments and a wide array of sounds. This exciting era of blasting MIDI tunes and witnessing the fast technological progress in the realms of PC gaming introduced me to a variety of art forms—from illustration to music, from animation to user interfaces, and to that damn Monkey Wrench puzzle.
As a child, I never owned a console, but my friends did. At their houses—I always adored the dithered worlds, experimental PS1-era jungle beats, and colorful blue skies on NES and Sega Genesis, built from great limitations. I was having a wild time experiencing something new every month—something that I hadn’t ever seen before—in the form of demo discs. While growing up in these affine texture-warped times, I understood how much can be achieved with so little.
At the same time, on the verge of Windows 95, I fooled around a lot with Klik & Play, a software created for making games and applications with ease. It paved the way for me to illustrate my imagination onto my screen with event-based scripting. Since there wasn't internet back then in our house, I had to make all the assets by myself. This was a great motivator for me to learn all kinds of artistic skills.
I had been participating in piano lessons only to lose interest; for a while, I thought music wasn’t for me at all. But, somewhere in the early 2000s, I got my first audio sequencer from the now-defunct Anttila store. Prior to that, I had been playing around with loop-based applications such as Hip-Hop/Dance-E-Jay. My then-new sequencer didn't have built-in metronome functionalities; I had to learn to keep time manually, and because I didn’t have access to samples, loops, or MIDI-sequencing, I had to record all the instruments by myself. I wanted to capture what I was hearing in my head, so once again I had a great motivator to learn various instruments. Since then, making music has been one of the biggest passions in my life.
For reasons unknown, even though I got high grades in music and the arts, I never believed in my chances of having a career in them. As a venture to pursue a "real job," I decided to become an automation technician—it was a weird time filled with programming robots and nailing electrical wires on the walls. As I waded through the classes, my mind was always on other things. After graduating and spending time on construction sites, I understood I was on the wrong path, even though I was decent at what I was doing at work. I took corrective measures and shifted my focus towards computers.
After a couple of failed applications into media engineering, I went with software engineering (even though I hadn’t ever written a line of code prior). I had a rocky start and almost fell flat, but as I started building my very own website on my Linux server, something clicked. I spent many late nights configuring my servers, programming IRC chatbots, and building the website; all this felt somehow anarchistic and cool. I also switched Linux distributions like socks and customized them in increasingly interesting ways. At this point, I had totally abandoned Windows for good. But too often, I found myself banging my head against the wall with Linux issues. I felt I was in a situation where technical roadblocks were limiting me when the inspiration hit.
Soon after I became an engineer, I was hired to work at Paytrail, a payment service provider, where I was a jack of all trades and a master of none—a full-stack developer, as they say. But, over time, I gravitated towards more and more user experience-related areas of work; back then, I didn't even know there was a word (UX) for it. With great support from my supervisor, I dropped the backend-related tasks altogether and took responsibility for the frontend, including design. I had a chance to facelift a bunch of software, convert legacy software into being more mobile responsive, and take care of the accessibility requirements in a project done for the State Treasury. Everything started to slowly make sense.
Around this time, I also started doing freelance work (without a company), including video-game music for NES/SNES and Mega Drive hardware (at Mega Cat Studios), logo designs for clients, podcast jingles, and even wall art for Paytrail's office. At this time I felt I had a lot to give, but I was held back by my fears of being a part-time entrepreneur and imposter syndrome.
As I switched jobs, I felt my job descriptions no longer reflected what I was driving towards. During COVID-19, I took a risk and announced at work that I wanted to focus purely on design, which I then did for two years. Not too long after I purchased my first Apple device. For the first time ever, it felt that technology worked with me, not against me. I took some certifications (Google, CalArts) to fill in the gaps in my competence and burst forward. From then on, I decided to pursue design as a valid career path.
Over the course of 2023, a lot went wrong in the world, causing layoffs, depression, and overall uncertainty. As I lost my job, I decided to pursue the thing that I had always been fearing the most: being an entrepreneur, a freelancer. I applied for a business ID and started offering my services that way too. At the moment I'm also working as a part-time UX Designer at Prospectum.
—Olli Suoranta