Ita-Lontoon Suomi-Koulu (East-London Finnish-School) is a Finnish language school for children and adults in East London. It was set up by Finnish parents in 2014 to ensure their children receive regular structured learning in the Finnish language.

The school needed to compile the many songs and poetry that are used with the different age groups into one book; it needed to be clear and uncluttered so as to be easy to follow and have an accompanying wordmark which could be rolled out on their website.

From the outset I established a deliberately expansive outside page margin so as to create a comfortable amount of space for your thumbs to sit whilst you engage with the book - this enables the lyrics to unobstructed which is a common problem with books in general.  

The book is typeset throughout in DIN Rounded so as to soften the very clean layout as the regular version of DIN would have been a bit too harsh when combined with the sparse design of the pages. The Logo/wordmark is a simple yet effective graphical representation of who the school are. By simply moving the ‘i’ in ‘Suomi’ forward so it intersects with the hyphen between ‘Suomi-Koulu’ and changing the colour to blue it becomes the Finnish flag.

David did a really nice job designing our school song book. They're really easy to follow and very clear. We wanted our songbooks to be different from the usual ones you find where there are pictures filling the pages - Lots of our children are bi-lingual and have non Finnish speaking parents so making it easy to follow was high on our list of requirements.

It's also really nice that he was able to include the flag of Finland into the letters on the front of the book. It is not something you notice right away but when you do it is hard to miss and quite clever!

Katja Kinnarinen - Principal