Seitsemanveljesta.net is a Finnish educational website created by Melon Arbus Productions in close collaboration with the Museum of Nurmijärvi. It aims to make the Finnish literary classic Seitsemän veljestä (literally translated The Seven Brothers) more accessible to modern audiences.
Seitsemän veljestä is the first and only novel by Aleksis Kivi, the national author of Finland. The novel is nowadays regarded as the first significant novel written in Finnish and by a Finnish-speaking author. Some people even think it is still the greatest Finnish novel ever written, but during the initial publication the novel got a mixed reception. In the novel Kivi depicts the Finns in a realistic fashion, which at the time was in a direct contrast to the romantic way most authors wanted to depict the so-called common folk.
My role in the project was very diverse. I was recruited as a graphic designer for Melon Arbus Productions and initially my responsibility was to create the wireframes for the website and design the visual user interface. I also had a hand in creating additional illustrations for the website, although I wasn’t the main illustration on the project. During the designing phase I additionally created visual mock-ups and took part in meetings with developers and our partners at the Nurmijärvi museum.
Later I was given the opportunity to participate in the development of the site as well as a front-end developer, together with other developers. I ended up having a big hand in the structure of the website and the final website is a collection of static sites, parsed together using PHP. The website has a couple of game-like features, but most of the content is static text and images.
As part of the project I also created documentation for the website’s accessibility and analytics tools. I became involved in the project in the spring of 2019 and the final website was published in the autumn of 2020. The published website can be visited at seitsemanveljesta.net.
