Blog: Behind the Scene
cookbook Wacom Bamboo Fun M Pen&Touch
Nearly every computer in our company has a graphics tablet connected to it. This fact is easy to explain, since we are all designers. Today yet another “pet” was adopted by our office: Wacom Bamboo Fun M Pen&Touch. I want to take this chance to share my personal impressions on this tablet.
journal Basecamp turns 6
In our day-to-day work we use a very handy yet powerful tool Basecamp, the leading web-based project collaboration tool. We use it from the moment of its appearance and it seems like it happened quite recently, but in fact Basecamp is now celebrating its 6th anniversary.
journal Portfolio Alternative Navigation
We have decided to slightly revise the concept of our site. Now we will be concentrating more on the portfolio, rather than on our blog. This makes sense considering the fact that we deliver services related to graphic design and we need cool clients. Moreover, our portfolio has become large and very attractive.
cookbook Tutorial: drawing a 3D character from a plain logo
Turbomilkers dig Twitter and most of us are thrilled by their ability to share their deep thoughts though this web service. When we faced the need to share the twits with twitter users from other countries, we developed a convenient service that will be translating our twits from Russian into any other language (a whole selection of languages) and post them in Twitter automatically.
cookbook 7 tricks for your corporate twitter
Our twitter @turbomilk is one of the most popular corporate twitters in Russia. The password to the twitter is available to all our staff but there is just a few of us posting. And, as it happens, most of the posts are coming from me. After more than a year of observations and experiments involving real people I came up with a range of plain tricks on how to make twitter more interesting and popular.
journal Best software products of 2009 by PC Magazine/RE
PC Magazine/RE has summarized the results of IT year and picked the best software products of 2009. We have carefully studied this list and gladly discovered two of our projects in it:
- 1C:Enterprise 8.2 platform
- LEXPRO Legal reference system
journal Iconza enlargement
Good news from Iconza — now it features 42 more icons! Painting these icons in difference colors and changing their sizes will give you thousands of alternatives! They are free as always. Stay healthy, munch on carrot and use Iconza’s icons.
journal 404 Festival really rocked!
Recently Samara hosted a grandiose event – 404 web developers’ festival! The event took place in the luxurious interiors of Holiday Inn hotel. We have enjoyed many reports, talks and conversations, master classes and acquaintances. This time around our company was helping the guys from Dominion in setting up the event. First, we were getting ready, then we worried a lot and later shuttled back and forth at the conference. Only now, that the festival is over, we are resting pleased and relaxed.
journal Turboflag
The walls of our cozy office are decorated with many different flags and banners. So where do they come from? The answer is simple: if any of our Turbomilkers goes somewhere, he comes back with a flag of that place. Today we failed to follow this tradition and added yet another flag without having someone travel for it. Now we have our own corporate banner or Turboflag. Hurrah?!
journal Renewed site running Wordpress
Yesterday we launched the renewed version of our site. Although the main upgrade is concealed from the eyes of regular users: we changed the site’s platform. We used to have MovableType and now we moved to Wordpress. We also renewed our home page to feature larger and more vivid pictures and slightly updated the portfolio section.
Please keep us posted on any bugs and/or errors at ufo@turbomilk.com or through the contact form at the top.
journal Pig Radio
We honestly loved Seven Skies radio for a long time, but it bothered us. Too much jazz and abstruse music. We need something simple and morden. Meet, today we’re listening to a great Pig Radio (audio-stream).
cookbook Looking for an alternative to Basecamp: review of PBworks Project Edition
Strictly speaking, Basecamp should not be regarded as a project management tool. Even its developers agree to this. “Basecamp is the leading web-based project collaboration tool”—says the official site of this highly respected program in large font. Basecamp is a communication tool. It is alternative to emails. Basecamp will not be able to measure the work load for the whole team nor for each member individually. Basecamp is also unable to evaluate the realism of set deadlines. Instead, it simply helps us at exchanging the required information inside a team and with our clients.
journal Fusion Ads
Turbomilk: Custom icon design for websites, mobile and desktop applications. We at Turbomilk decided to join the hordes of banner advertisers considering banners to be the most classical and fair way of advertising. We ended up choosing Fusion Ads banner network for our campaign. No flash, no animation, just a static picture. Madness?! You could say that. But what a campaign!
cookbook Hooking up two monitors to Macbook or turning an old iMac into a Firewire monitor
I do graphic design on a notebook. This is hustle-free if you hook up your notebook to a 24-inch screen. But once I realized that one big screen was not enough. I wanted yet another monitor. But my notebook is equipped with just one monitor extension port and external video cards for macs are rather rare. So it happens that I found a deserted iMac G5 with a 20-inch screen in our office. I have fiddled with the hardware a bit and came up with the following kind of desktop:
cookbook How to draw recolorable icons
What is a recolorable icon? It is a picture which is capable of changing its color, hence is the world recolorable. There are several ways of getting there. I will tell you about a simple technique that we used while developing Iconza. In essence it’s a web application that provides for changing colors of icons followed by generating the required files.
journal Iconfinder meets Iconza
Now Iconza’s icons are available in Iconfinder, the icon search engine. But they are not merely lying around there. You can recolor them right on the search engine results page. Originally the Iconza’s icons are depicted in Gothic black and a special switch serves for selecting the right color. We also would like to use the opportunity to give our best to the creator of Iconfinder Martin Leblanc.
cookbook How we came up with the name for Iconza and later made its logo
We decided upon making a web application that would serve a collection of customizable icons. Any project needs a cool name and a logo. We started off with naming.
journal Iconza
We have launched a new Turboproject called Iconza with a whiskered carrot for a logo. In essence it is a set of royalty-free icons but it is not as simple as it looks. You can recolor and resize the icons right on your screen!
journal Everything should change
We have invented something special here in Turbomilk and even shot a video about it. We won’t show it, because it’s not ready yet. However, we will show you a short teaser that really does not tell you a thing :)
cookbook Five reasons for migrating to the new Illustrator CS4
All new stuff is extremely lucrative: it lures a feeling of novelty and freshness. I sincerely believe that a newer version is always better than the previous one. But there is one software package that undermines my life views. I am talking about Adobe Illustrator. It gained so many useless functions that operational mistakes have become too easy to see. It all lasted for six passed years. Here is an appropriate time for a short sermon.
About this Blog
We at Turbomilk talk about the subtleties and nuances of visual interface design in a popular scientific style. In our blog we give you touching stories about icons, critique of other people’s designs — and praise of our own! — plus exciting links and news on the life of the company.
- Journal — snappy notes bursting with info on given topics
- Articles — extensive ponderings about the eternal subjects and secrets of design
We will be over the moon if you decide to place a link to our site from your site or blog. We have stashed one pretty picture for precisely that purpose:
Please refer to the home page of our site: www.turbomilk.ru
We often write
rather useful stuff.
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articlesWacom Bamboo Fun M Pen&Touchemailtoid.net/i/27187ea2/…: Thanks for sharing :) I have an ANCIENT wacom tablet (not even sure what the model is) and Im looking to get a new one...you know... that works. I really like painting in photoshop so I was kind of planning to get an Intuos 4 medium, but I hear that the rough surface on them causes you to go through pen nibs like crazy. The bamboo is tempting because of the price, and it may be a good solution since Im not even sure if I will like using a tablet.
articlesTutorial: drawing a 3D character from a plain logojoukov: Evgeniya uses BenQ 241W and its calibrated by Spyder 3. Here at Turbomilk we prefer to switch off any color management in Adobe products.
articlesTutorial: drawing a 3D character from a plain logoCzerny: I really love your wonderful work! Could you please tell me what color profiles you use and which displays? Would you recommend to work in sRGB or in Adobe RGB if you create something like this? Thaaaanks and Merry Christmas to Russia!! :-)
articles10 Mistakes in Icon Designhellelampe.myopenid.com/: Thank you for the article! It did help me a lot.
articlesLooking for an alternative to Basecamp: review of PBworks Project Editionclaimid.com/kylekeller: Nice post, especially your part about how to look for these tools. I spent some time playing around and settled on ProjectSpaces -- www.projectspaces.com, because although it did not have every feature in the book, I was able to easily setup projects and not have to take too much time training clients on how to use it. Might want to give it a shot too.