Ilmar
Kuljus

An ambient installation that transformed one of the gates at Tallinn Airport into a cabinet library — a comfortable reading and book-swap lounge celebrating Estonian writers and literature. Four iconic Estonian authors were chosen, each representing a different era in Estonian literary history. The centrepiece of the space was four enormous 3D sculptural heads of those writers, acting as a crowd magnet and visual anchor for the whole installation. Visitors could swap physical hardcover books, download e-books by scanning QR codes from the shelves, and explore a large touchscreen display introducing a companion reading app. Board games were also available for waiting travellers.

An airport gate is a dead space — people are stuck there, restless, killing time on their phones. The challenge was designing something that actually earns attention in that environment rather than just adding to the noise. By making the space genuinely useful and culturally meaningful, we turned a waiting area into somewhere people actually wanted to be. Every design decision had to work at scale — readable from across the gate, inviting up close, and coherent as a total environment.

A Refleks agency calendar that came as a complete set — a black paper calendar with glossy black text, paired with a white pencil. The pencil wasn't decoration. It was the point. Users were meant to write in their own dates, cross out days, leave notes — the calendar only becomes fully itself once the owner starts using it.

The idea lives in the tension between what's there and what isn't. Black on black means the text is present but quiet — you have to look for it. The white pencil hands control back to the user, making every calendar unique the moment someone picks it up. My job was to design something that felt deliberately unfinished, in the best possible way.

Every summer, Tallinn's roadworks fill the city with temporary traffic signs — redirecting, frustrating, and quietly reshaping how people move through their days. Instead of letting those signs go to landfill, we gave them a second life. Each sign became a calendar page for 2024, rehabilitated from traffic obstacle into something useful, something that would sit on a wall for years to come.

The concept only lands if the design stays out of its own way. My job was to let the signs speak — to treat them with enough restraint that the idea reads immediately, but with enough craft that it feels intentional rather than lazy. The result is something that rewards a second look: familiar objects made quietly strange by being taken out of context.

A large-scale international exhibition exploring European maritime exploration from the mid-18th to mid-19th century. The exhibition brought together historical artefacts from museums across France, the Netherlands, the UK, Finland, Sweden, and Estonia, and ran at Tallinn's Lennusadam Seaplane Harbour.

Photographing a scale model and making it feel like a real vessel at sea is a specific challenge — lighting, angle, and composition all have to work together to sell the illusion. My years at sea gave me an instinct for how a ship like this would actually look under open skies, and I used that to guide every decision in the shoot.