Turbomilk

The purpose of LondonClasses social network lies in connecting people who teach certain classes with those who need such classes. The author of the startup approached us for a logo, which would reflect the idea of trainings and display all benefits of the project. The project’s name is arbitrary, since the developers planned for several sites – one for each city or state. Examples: LondonClasses.co.uk, CaliforniaClasses.us, SanFranciscoClasses.us, BirminghamClasses.co.uk.

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Not so long ago Yegor Gilyov published his article “Exporting design comp from AI to PSD the right way” in which he told us about three steps required to avoid problems when converting AI-files to PSD. The required output is a picture that 100% matches its vector source.

I would like to deepen into the subject and show you a few useful tricks of using the Illustrator for exporting, which would save the time (which is always a limited resource), nerves (that unfortunately are not recoverable) and turn this process into a mere pleasure. So let’s start:

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Not that long ago our portfolio of characters was replenished with a new character — we drew a noble purebred aviator cat for Sindbad. For 16 years Sindbad offered to its users a convenient search interface for purchasing air tickets at the most affordable prices. The service provides for the best air fare deals Russia-wide and overseas.

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Nowadays you can often times meet interface designers who gave up using the good old Adobe Photoshop in favor of vector instruments. In other words, in favor of Adobe Illustrator. The advantages are obvious: while working with the vector source one can better control the process than while working with a bitmap (even if it is split into layers). In a vector editor a drawn circle will remain a drawn circle and in Photoshop it will be just a multitude of painted pixels. Finally, in a vector editor it is much easier to create versions for screens with different pixel density (dpi) — Hello, Retina Display!

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So it happened that we decided to participate in a designers’ competition. At the first glance, there is nothing odd about it, since we are in the industry of design ourselves. The odd part about it is the object of design, which in this case was presented as an iron heating mains hatch cover. The point is that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Kuibyshevenergo Headquarters — the owner of the heating mains. In order to commemorate this Voljskaya TGK decided to conduct a contest for the best design of hatch covers and later cast some of such anniversary covers in iron.

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Creating icons is a rather conservative area of design. Often a new and original icon works much worse than a standard and conventional one. But our industry does not stand still – new devices with new interfaces come into light and it changes the ways of operating such devices. It happens rather slowly but some trends are quite obvious.

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Over the past few years, the 3D graphics technologies have been developing at sky rocket speed. The calculation algorithms of photorealistic images, increase in the number of processor cores and the RAM volume (as well as the new GPU rendering technology) have made it possible to obtain high quality pictures while working from home. 3D has become a powerful tool of graphic design. There are a number of unarguable reasons for using the 3D approach with speed of operation being the most substantial.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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? :)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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