Mitol Meerna
aka metalisko 🦎
My world revolves around producing and searching for visual & other sensory brilliance: amazing colors, sounds and voices that simply make my heart sing, beautiful patterns and comfy textures, technological wonder and ever so great humour. And the people. I love my people.
I make awesome 2D art and many types of publication work for projects with a positive vibe. Organizing culture and gaming events is one of my passions.
I do all of my work from home, because my home office beats every office I've seen in equipment, peacefulness and general accessibility. Why I need this is the fact I'm autistic and have ADHD, and I have chronic pain in my back and feet. These conditions and neurodevelopmental differences don't affect my work as long as I get to do everything from home. I'm completely used to working remotely, both with a team and by myself.
Espoo, Finland
Commissions?
If you are a new customer and interested in commissioning designs, illustrations, websites or something else, you can send me a message on Instagram. Because I get lots of spam, it might take me some time to notice your message, so please be patient.
(I'm working on a better solution for contacting me.)
Visual Artist and Designer for life
When it comes to visual art & design, there’s nothing I won’t try at least once – as long as it has a positive vibe.
Every project teaches me something new, and that’s what keeps me going. I need to be able to develop my skills and learn new things on a regular basis, in order to stay motivated. My brain seems to crave for new knowledge, and I'm willing to feed it just that.
I love working with both digital and traditional tools. However, after an injury to my lower back and feet some years back, I’ve preferred the digital realm, because it has fewer limitations of when and where I can work.
In the last four years I’ve also started to teach myself more programming to support my artistic & professional goals. I wish to learn so much more about web design, and maybe some day learn how to code apps for mobile. 😍
UI/UX design has always intrigued me, and I do love talking about both.
2D Graphics
Throughout the years I’ve collected a vast amount of experiences and knowledge of different types of graphical work for both web and print. And yes, I automatically gravitate towards new and exciting styles and techniques. It also often gives me ideas and motivation to do things I already know in a different way.
This has been useful not only for myself but for everyone around me who is interested in these topics. I might be a stranger amongst most Finns, because I love to share what I've learned and how to prevent certain mishaps and whatnot.
At the moment, I'm focusing exclusively on two-dimensional graphics. My goal is to develop my 2D skills as high & deep as they can get. However, this doesn’t stop me from designing things that will, in the end product, be three-dimensional, such as package design, presentation tables and stuff like that.
See some of my recent works at digital art.
Website Designer
I love making websites. It’s such a wonderful way of combining at least three things that are in my everyday interest radar: Visuals, code and writing. I’ve learned some badass HTML / CSS skills & now I’ve started teaching myself Javascript.
I have a thorough basic knowledge around WordPress and how to control its themes & plugins. It is what I've used the most when it comes to content managing, and I'm also getting quite efficient in understanding how the themes are built. PHP is ever so strange a language, but I'm starting to get the hang of it too.
I have also made content for websites using a different CMS. This portfolio, for example, is on Adobe Portfolio. I've made the website look and feel much like my own, although I do miss the possibility to make touches to the CSS styles by text rather than the complex menu.
One of my main goals in learning website design is to find ways to make the most beautiful and accessible designs, taking into account as many challenges as possible that people may have.
I have a strong basic understanding of how to create SEO materials and how to formulate effective keyphrases. Even though I’m quite new to the subject, I recently received quite high praise for my work on SEO from a client and their associates.
Apparently years of doing marketing and publications on social and other types of media has schooled me for intuitively catching how people will search for certain things.
Websites I've designed from start to finish
For all of these websites, I designed the visual look and layout of the site almost from scratch. Usually I have to do it using one or two pre-existing elements per project and, if they happen to have it, a graphic style guide with some colors and fonts to begin with.
I built the themes using a simple template theme as the base and editing & creating CSS, PHP & HTML, fixed timetable plugin styles and installed & configured the contact forms and other specific basic plugins. In all the cases I also wrote some parts of the content and edited images to better suit the web format. SEO is nowdays included in my services.
Examples of other websites I've contributed to
In the spring 2022 I updated the look and feel of the Vectorama website to better fit to our current styles & needs. I’ve written, proofread, reorganized and rewritten the content quite a bit over the last 4 years with my team. The background image is my design made specifically for this website in 2022. I like how it turned out.
My contribution on the museum’s new website is mainly to the content and making it shine on its own. I got lots of positive feedback and also important learning experiences while working with this site.
In 2019 the communications team made great many changes to the Tracon website: in addition to updating the content for the next event, we reorganized, combined and reformatted quite many areas on the site and wrote some new ones from scratch.
Social Media & Publishing
My interest in different social media platforms is based on finding out how to play them. I see it as a game of, let's say, attention spans. Over the years I've learned to consume social media content in a manner that shows me what lies beyond different things.
My eyes and ears are open, and my neurodivergent brain is excellent at pattern recognition. By just hanging out on a platform I'm subjected to the algorithms and their suggestions, and I start to see what kind of behavior leads to more or less certain type of content. I've become to understand those algorithms quite well – not how they're built but how they work from a content-creator's viewpoint.
Because of my profession, I have an active interest in visual trends and how to develop them further. This, and the pattern recognition, help me to write efficiently for larger audiences, at least on Finland's scale.
My own pages
- Instagram: metalisko.art
- Twitter: metalisko
Vectorama's social media I maintain
- Instagram: VectoramaIG
- Twitter: VectoramaLAN
- Facebook: Vectorama