Linda Saukko-Rauta
The one who draws, founder of Redanredan, entrepreneurial mastermind
Who?
I’m Linda Saukko-Rauta, a graphic recorder and a sketchnoter, and Redanredan is my company that I founded in 2010. I do graphic recording at seminars, events and workshops and these days of course remote graphic recording. I also do other illustrations and strategy visualizations.
I started out by drawing comics about my teeny-tiny life as a Swedish teacher and ended up doing business.
How did I become an illustrator?
I am often asked if I am a trained graphic designer or a visual artist. Well, I’m not. MA with a Nordic philology-English-Finnish twist is a degree that suits this job.
I have always drawn: as a child I drew at home under the desk of my entrepreneur mother and at school all my books and notebooks were scribbled. When I was in middle school, I did my very first commissioned work and got a gift card as a reward: I drew a menu for a restaurant in Seinäjoki, and I drew at least some cactus plants and sombreros in the picture.
I still draw
When I went to study at the university – first in Umeå, Sweden, and then in Vaasa and finally Jyväskylä here in Finland – I took a break from drawing for a few years, except for sketches during those long and boring lectures.
I started sketching again during my teacher studies. My skills turned out to be a big benefit for a teacher. I continued that and then Facebook came and I decided to draw cartoon strips about the dreary life of a language teacher. After drawing a couple of years, I started a blog in 2009. My blog had been active for about a year, when I received the first request for quotation and I founded my own company.
I abandoned my post as a teacher for a job as an e-learning specialist and bought an iPad. All of a sudden I was sitting in meetings a lot and I got… um… a little bit bored. I started drawing what I heard, made it into pictures, created visual notes. By chance and by saying “Yeah!” I ended up with my iPad at the Nordic Business Forum event and the business scene here in Finland became very interested in what I was doing. At first, drawing was a side-show but in the fall of 2015 I made the decision to become a full-time entrepreneur. (I have not regretted.)
I am the most experienced digital graphic recorder in Finland. (Do I dare to say this? Well, I do!) In this job, everything I’ve done and experienced in the past is useful. In 2019 I was awarded the national sole entrepreneur award – the first time ever!
And I still draw.
Examples of my work & customers
