Blog: Behind the Scene
cookbook How we came up with and drew the mascot for 404 Festival
In the coming fall the next (third in a row) festival of web developers, Internet evangelists, designers and other supporters of the industry will be held in Samara. You are welcome to learn more about the event, its history, organizers and participants here and this article talks about the mascot we developed for the upcoming event.
journal Userpic for the country’s main twitter
The RF President’s twitter is followed by over 60,000 people and bots taking into account only its Russian version. Beside contents, this microblog is also famous for its visual identity (aka userpic). Not many of you know that it was created by Turbomilk.
cookbook The story of one illustration: 404 error page for Iconfinder
Every site has a 404 error page. Its purpose is to tell the user that he landed in the wrong place. It is unnecessary to scare the user by some alarming page, though the message should be clear to all. Some time ago we created a character for the icon search engine conveniently named Iconfinder, now it was the time to create an illustration for its 404 page.
cookbook The graphics style of the 1972 Munich Olympics
One day I spotted a rather unusual poster. It looked very special and I was won by the pleasant mix of colors and simplicity.
It turned out that this was one of the posters made for the Olympics of 1972 in Munich. I was surprised by how fresh and contemporary the work looked realizing that the poster was created almost 40 years ago. I decided to study the style of this event more carefully and started web surfing.
cookbook These could be the new LiveJournal’s icons
Long time ago three designers from Samara got acquainted with each other through LiveJournal. This led to talks and discussion over their own portfolios and works of others. And so Turbomilk was born. Clearly, when the competition for new icons for LiveJournal was unveiled, we got excited and went straight to work.
journal Robotodo
I like robots and all the things related to them. Robots represent the modern technology and symbolize the future and all the advance stuff. And in the future we will be meeting robots on every corner and someday they will become our friends! That’s probably why I enjoy drawing them.
journal Report on Creative Future 2010 Conference
Not very long ago the delegation of Turbomilkers visited a conference for creative professionals called Creative Future 2010. There are not that many events targeting designers held in Russia, so we went to Moscow without much hesitation. The conference’s venue was a great choice – Oktiabr cinema on New Arbat.
cookbook Quick review of Wacom Cintiq 21UX Intuos 4
One of the goals I had for the visit to the recent Creativefuture 2010 conference was a “conversation” with the outstanding new Wacom Cintiq pad. Each professional is very careful about his working tools, therefore I went straight to the Wacom’s stand. There was a thick crowd of curious people and I had very limited time for the test drive – others were lining up behind me. I waited diligently in the line and started the “tasting” process.
I picked Cintiq 21UX Intuos4. Why going cheap? :)
journal We have moved into a new office
Our company has gradually expanded so that we could not all fit into our old office space. So we moved into a new office, which is twice the size of the previous location. Now we are seated on the 18th floor of a high building of glass and concrete in a business center of Samara.
So our address has changed accordingly to: 1806-1807, Scala Hall Business Center, Building 2, 4a Moskovskoye shosse, Samara, 443013
journal Tips from Iconfinder
Our article “10 mistakes in icondesign”, the one that survived the digg effect and the visit by Jakob Nielsen, even two years down the line continues to inspire and lead icon designers from all over the World. Our friend Martin from Iconfinder took the article and a presentation by Jon Hicks and with his colleague Shawn put together a marvellous post a with all kinds of tips for using icons in interface design.
journal Zoomeyes are back!
When a man works on a computer he looks into the monitor and sees various applications. We thought: “What if the applications could look back at the man with their large clear eyes?!” This idea lead to the creation of a free set of goggled Zoomeyes 2 icons meant to replace the default application icons.
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?!
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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articlesLooking for an alternative to Basecamp: review of PBworks Project Editiondeepika10: This is very informative article. But i want to suggest more alternative to basecamp that is http://www.proofhub.com/ It is easy to use and fast. It includes many tools like time tracking, Collaboration, Milestones, Online File Proofing, Real Time Chat and many more.
journalWe have moved into a new officetype8: can show some photo of the inside few ?
articlesThese could be the new LiveJournal’s icons type8: your logo is quite nice. simple and clean. maybe what they want is fresh look. easy to recognize the icon. some of your icon is hard to recognize the image, example "track this" icon. The winner icon is not as good as your icon, but what they got is fresh look, simple. that is what i can say
articlesThese could be the new LiveJournal’s icons Czerny: I think a lot website owners would prefer the icons with button because your icons look great but they need .png alpha transparency... And with the button it needs only 4 x 1px transparency on each of the rounded corners which can be made within .gif-files. Most big websites needs full IE6 support and it is too complicated to handle .png-files in some reasons. Damn IE6!!
articlesLooking for an alternative to Basecamp: review of PBworks Project EditionSydneyCoyle: This is information is very useful, thank you. But I am concerned with having to use multiple software to accomplish online CRM tasks while fulfilling management needs for my freelance projects. It’s good that I found one that came in handy for collaborative CRM and project management - http://www.worketc.com/CRM_Project_Management -- with the integration of business tools that meets multiple needs such as time-tracking, resource leads, and billing.