/personal

If you’re looking for a CV, there isn’t one. My LinkedIn profile is the closest you can get. I run a small company, N. Nyman Ltd, and we work on challenging Flash ActionScript projects for various clients. We’re (unbelievably slowly!) working on a portfolio and a blog which will give you a better idea of our Flash work. I’ve ran the company since 1997 but I’ve also worked for others during that time, namely as an art director for Grey Interactive, and as a strategist for Razorfish. Meanwhile I’ve dipped my toes in music production work, producing music for the Finnish market (for which I have a gold and double-platinum discs in the attic) and composing, producing and licensing my own music with the peak moment being a swift visit to the UK Singles Top 40.

For fun I tend to eat well, write, and very, very irregularly make new music. In 2007 I co-wrote a book on social media and marketing. In March 2008, the book was awarded the “Kultasulka” award — basically the Finnish Association of Marketing Communication Agencies chose the book as the literary work of the year 2007. If you can understand Finnish, you can read more about the book on the book wiki. If you can understand the language of music, you can go and download my free music on the Softys site.

Just like a blog should be, this blog is about my personal opinions on my personal interests. Right now I’m interested in the following topics:

• User experience at the intersection of marketing, usability and business strategy. The value of user experience.
• WTFP, or With The Feeling Programming. This is our perhaps hilariously named, but somewhat serious take on how to be an effective programmer in Flash projects. Perhaps in other small coding projects, too.
• Project management, time management and stress-free, organized work.

Some other things I seem to be drawn to right now are:

• Programmatic visuals. Programmed art, beautiful data visualization — making the computer turn numbers into imagery. I’m not a huge fan of trying to find usefulness in this, I just enjoy the visual stimulation.
• Combining electronics with Flash, and all the cool installations this combination enables us to do.
• Drive and continuous inspiration. What drives people to concentrate on something for years? What makes people push forward every day and never grow tired?

Why these topics?

Programming is what we do, and I’m interested in pragmatic programming practices and project management because I strive to make work more enjoyable, interesting and meaningful. The results of our work — and almost all work I’ve done in the past — has to do with user experience: is the result of our work making people happy? Excited? Bored? Angry? Extatic? And what does the answer to those questions mean to our clients? How do our deliverables affect the way our clients are perceived? In effect, is our work doing the job of marketing, even when it is not intended to do that?