The student union magazine Visiiri has chosen 40-year-old graphic designer and photographer Joel Peltonen from Tampere as its new art director.
Joel is studying for a bachelor’s degree with a specialization in visual journalism at Tampere University. In addition to his work at Visiiri, he serves as a photo editor and graphic designer for the news department at the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Previously, Joel studied digital audio and commercial music at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. He also has extensive experience in the field of marketing communications.
Joel plans to steer Visiiri’s visual style away from that of a traditional organization magazine towards a bolder, more daring direction. He hopes to increase the magazine’s appeal with bold visual solutions.
As a photojournalist, Joel is fascinated by people, backyards, and incompleteness. Peeling paint on a gutter captivates him more than a Tesla. In his personal life, he is passionate about obscure synthesizers, pub quizzes, and Tampere’s Ilves hockey team.
“I approach this role with great enthusiasm, respect, and ambition. The contributors to Visiiri are talented journalists. They deserve a tailor-made visual suit that allows their work to shine at its brightest. I hope to create a visual design for Visiiri that encourages more people to pick up the magazine,” Joel explains his vision. Joel started working in his new role in November 2024.
Employees who started earlier in the autumn
We have recruited a few more employees who have started their work this autumn, but we have not communicated about them before this article.
Iikka Sorvali has been an editorial trainee at Visiiri this autumn. Iikka graduated from the Peace, mediation and conflict research master’s programme in Tampere this spring. During his studies, he was involved in a variety of student association activities, so the intricacies of student politics were in relative knowledge even before his internship. He has a few years’ worth of work experience from freelance work and has worked for a short time as a summer reporter.
Iikka describes Visiiri as his best workplace so far. “A lot of laughs and fun, which has been matched by suitable challenge and opportunities to develop one’s own work in many ways. For example, video tasks were quite unfamiliar to me before the internship, and it was really nice to get to try them out.”, Iikka describes.
Iikka describes his best memory from the internship as follows: “I was in the tram and saw Yle’s news compilation on the screen and there, a news article that was made based on an article I wrote. My first proper news win, hopefully not my last.”.
TREY’s autumn translator trainee Oskari Koski also says that working with Visiiri has been meaningful – his favorite memory from the internship is related to translating Visiiri’s articles: “Visiiri’s articles have been interesting to translate. The main thing that stuck in my mind was a story about a new study that suggested that smartwatches could predict the risk of sudden death in the future.”.
Oskari is a student of multilingual communications and translation science who specialises in interpreting in his studies. Oskari says that it has been a while since his translation courses, so it took some time to remember how the translation process goes when he was beginning his work. “Working for TREY has been going well. And fast. No grand feelings either way.”, Oskari describes his internship.
Oskari’s and Iikka’s internships are now ending as we move on to the holiday break. As a permanent addition to TREY’s office, Sami Perkiö, our new specialist in events and community, joined TREY’s office in the beginning of autumn. Before his employment, Sami was responsible for events and tutoring in TREY’s Board. Sami has been studying for eight years, which has so far left him with music pedagogy papers. Sami is currently studying information technology. Sami has a long history of association work, of which he specifically mentions the Teacher Student Union of Finland SOOL, Tampere SOOL Winter Day Association TASOTA ry and the subject association MusTa ry.
“Work has started with a bang, the pace has been nice. After all, the content of the work did not change massively compared to my work in TREY’s Board, so it has not been challenging to orientate myself to my new work,” Sami describes and continues: “The nicest thing about work has been working in an office with a relaxed, conversational and restful atmosphere. I also like the periodicity of the work, as it revolves around one event at a time.” Sami started in his position in September 2024.
