People of Vaisala: Meet Noe Anttonen, Product and Package Design Specialist

People of Vaisala is a spotlight series that shows what it looks and feels like to work at Vaisala in different roles, teams, and locations. In each story, we meet one colleague and explore how one of our three behaviors shows up in their everyday work. This time: Curious. 

Designing markings that make products clearer

Based in the Vantaa office, Noe Anttonen works as a Product and Package Design Specialist focusing on product and package markings and labels. The role covers product and package markings, from type labels and brand appearance to compliance information and user-facing texts. Driven by curiosity, Noe brings markings into the product development process from the very beginning, ensuring that all essential information about a product is understood, consistent, and easy to use for both users and internal stakeholders.

Before Noe joined, markings were handled in different ways across teams. Today, the work is centralized and more standardized, with active development of processes and tools in collaboration with colleagues. Markings can also be seen as a puzzle: limited space, increasing amounts of information, and the need to connect inputs from various teams so that the end result serves both users and compliance needs.

People, trust, and a versatile workday

No two workdays look exactly the same. The role can include project meetings, markings-related new product projects and engineering tasks, documentation updates, as well as hands-on design tools such as Adobe Illustrator. An interest in how things could work better also leads to involvement in diverse initiatives including service design work and process development. The work offers a balance of independent tasks and teamwork, supported by flexibility in how and where work is done.

What keeps Noe at Vaisala are, first and foremost, the people and the culture. The team is described as an amazing and warm community where support is readily available and where work has been appreciated from the start. Trust and flexibility, from planning the workday to combining work with life with a little dog, strongly increase motivation and a sense of ownership. 

Curiosity as a way of working, at Vaisala and beyond

For Noe, being curious is not just a word, it shows up in the work every day. New ways of working are continuously explored, from journey operations and service design to experimenting with printing tools and for example software like Smaply. University collaboration, including mentoring Aalto PDP projects and hosting student visits, has also become an important and rewarding theme, offering opportunities to learn, pitch in front of large audiences, and build new partnerships.

Outside the office, Noe brings the same mindset into many areas: bouldering, theatre, motorcycling, and personal challenges such as running. Each new hobby or project is a way to step into unfamiliar situations and see what opens up. As Noe puts it, “new environments might feel a bit scary at first, but they also open a lot of new doors.”