Kisko Labs has been growing quite fast in the recent months. We have transformed from a business and technical partner to a holistic product and prototype craftshop. Our aim is not to seek faster growth, but to build stronger teams and a better company.

Now our family grows by two people. Welcome our new designers, Antti Salonen and Viljami Salminen.

Antti already jumped in and has been chipping in projects, for example, developing our own web UI framework, called Kisko Compass. Previously he almost single-handedly took care of the whole web design side at Otava publishing. Antti is also an enthusiastic hacker and has participated in several RailsRumbles.

Viljami Salminen will start by the end of this month, and like he says on his site, he loves to design simple and usable interfaces – just what we love as well. Like Antti and myself, Viljami also builds his designs into flowing web mobile interfaces. Viljami likes to experiment with different technologies and projects – take a look at his new mobile gig finding app, called Keikalle.com.

I think it’s really important that our designers can work, and want to work beyond Photoshop screens, since the the user experience gets built on the application. Our goal is always a working application, not pretty pictures or great code base.

So we are not your usual design studio or a code factory. We aim to build the teams that will build your product.

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Another change is, that right about now, I’ll be leaving my post at Kisko Labs.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been traveling around the Valley, and just got back from SXSWi in Austin. Something I have known since co-founding ArcticStartup, is that I have a passion for startups. Startup people are really excited about what they do, they are towards action and results not just motion and they have a mission and a vision which they need to prove to everyone else.

Kisko is a great place for a lot of these things. We work on new products and with startups, building and prototyping things no-one else has before, and we also aim for results and action, not dwell on planning or waste time on meetings. It was not an easy choice to leave.

Having said that I’m also a gamer in heart and I got a really good opportunity from my friend Ville Vesterinen to join Grey Area. They just recently raised 1.9M EUR to build the company and develop the location based iPhone MMORPG, Shadow Cities, into a global hit.. At Grey Area I’ll take a role in the creative team, and be responsible for designing the web experience of the game.

I will still stay on the Kisko Labs board and help the guys where I can, but I’ll focus my time on helping making the Shadow Cities to an international success.

So kudos to all the guys and clients of Kisko Labs.

– Karri