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Champion of Craft: Lotta Nieminen

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Mohawk
Photography
Lotta Nieminen
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This year we kicked off a series of storytelling inserts entitled “Champions of Craft,” created to recognize the work of aspiring and seasoned designers and makers. 

In the November/December 2015 issue of GDUSA, we champion the work of Lotta Nieminen, a Finland based illustrator, graphic designer and art director, whose love for materials and color drives her work.

“Color has always been important in my work,” says Lotta Nieminen, whose one-woman studio’s clients run the gamut from Google to Hermes and include some of the beauty and design industry’s most respected and recognizable names. Descendant from artists, she explains, “When we were little, my mother would stop me and my sisters to look if she’d spot a ‘beautiful red’ or a ‘gorgeous shade of green’—I would assume that’s where the fondness comes from!”

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Hang tags created as part of Maeven's identity system
Lotta Nieminen

Trained at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Rhode Island School of Design, Nieminen originally intended to focus solely on graphic design, but, to her surprise, soon found her illustrations in high demand. In her graphic design and art direction work, she favors fewer colors with big impact. Placing emphasis on materials, she is drawn to minimal design with a strong feeling of space in her compositions. Her illustration, however, embraces a profusion of color.

With styles by turns minimal and generous, refined and exuberant, Nieminen thrives off variation: “I like to wear multiple hats and alternate between disciplines. It keeps things interesting and the work ever evolving.”

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Interior of a catalog made for Matter Made
Lotta Nieminen

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