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Kokoro & Moi is a full service creative agency founded by Antti Hinkula and Teemu Suviala in 2001. Based in both Helsinki and New York, the agency specialises in using audacious ideas and innovative concepts to transform brands and revivify public institutions. Since being started twelve years ago by Antti and Teemu, who were then fresh out of education, Kokoro & Moi now employs a team of eight creatives and has produced work for global brands such as JC Decaux, Uniqlo, Mattel and Toyota, as well as Rovio, the startup behind Angry Birds, and cultural institutions like the American Institute of Architects and the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Working across print and digital, and authoring strategies that span a variety of different products and environments, Antti and Teemu have cultivated a reputation for finding imaginative directions for brands and unorthodox solutions to client’s problems. Collaboration is at the heart of the agency’s creative process, a fact acknowledged in its playfully polyglot name. ‘Kokoro’ is Japanese for ‘heart/mind/soul’, and was chosen as a nod to Yugo Katayama, one of the agency’s first Japanese clients, whereas ‘Moi’ finds its origin in the Finnish for ‘hello/goodbye’, and also serves as a sportive tribute to the Norwegian celebrity chef Trond Moi.

Reportedly, Antti and Teemu considered around five hundred different names for their nascent agency before Kokoro & Moi. The name, however, proved fortuitous, as it allowed them to use the aesthetically pleasing web domain www.kokoromoi.com, wherein every second letter is an ‘o’. Moreover, when ‘kokoro’ is combined with ‘moi’ it means ‘enlightenment’. This fearless approach to trialling and colliding new ideas to create something new, meaningful and interesting has since become characteristic of the agency’s progressive and authentic approach.

Emphasising the collaborative and free-spirited drive of the company, Kokoro & Moi recently worked on Yo Freckles, a typeface consisting of three-hundred and sixty-six glyphs designed by over one-hundred and thirty contributors. Compiled under the creative direction of Antti and Teemu between 23 November and 31 December 2011,Yo Freckles was chosen as the font family for the Finnish Design Yearbook 2012-13. It is also available for download under a creative commons licence.

Kokoro & Moi also developed the identity of Nordic Cool 2013, a month-long festival celebrating the theatre, dance, music, literature, cuisine, and film of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The event was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was visited by approximately two-hundred thousand people. Kokoro & Moi used a patchwork of graphic symbolisations of the unique region’s natural and cultural features to give the festival an engaging coherency.

To kick off 2014, the talented Antti and Teemu will be joining a whole host of other creatives at the forefront of their fields for Alpha-ville EXCHANGE. In what promises to be a vibrant and playful presentation, you can expect Kokoro & Moi to lift the curtain on their inimitable and imaginative creative process.