Turbomilk

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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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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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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We have been using Basecamp (web-based project management and collaboration tool developed by 37signals) for many years. I will not be able to truly emphasize on how important this tool is for us since our clients are scattered around the Globe and all communication with them is handled online.

For small service IT companies like ours, Basecamp became a de-facto standard. On one hand it is very convenient: new users recently invited into our cozy Extranet have no problem getting around. On the other hand, we get the feeling that Basecamp is “too tight”. And it is not surprising: you cannot please everyone and the guys from 37signals are well aware of that and not even trying.

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It was a year and a half ago, my head brimming with ideas about GTD, when I realized that an efficient system of self-organization based on the principles of GTD would make most sense if built around the email client; simply because the vast majority of incoming material requiring attention is delivered via email.

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You are probably beginning to boil over — it’s been three weeks since Dmitry revealed the mysteries of the vector stage of icon creation, so where is that continuation? Let me tell you why we made no haste.

The thing here is that we always try to cut down on this raster stage as much as possible. We take pains to dally that moment when we minimize Illustrator and launch Photoshop. I wish I’d never see that Photoshop! Where do I get that hatred to all designers’ holy cow? It’s nothing personal, I assure you. There is nothing bad I can say about Adobe Photoshop as a specimen of the class of raster editors, let alone the fact that it is crafted with more quality that our beloved vector-based Illustrator. My dislike lies not for the specific product but for all methods to edit an image whilst they are based on their raster output.

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At the dawning of my creative career the one and only vector-based drawing program was Corel Draw. I didn’t even care to think there were any other. Corel Draw was perfect until you had to rasterize your work. It was the worst I have ever seen in my life. To import your work in Photoshop, you had to save the vector in the EPS format, which is alien to Corel and kin to Adobe, losing some effects at the time.

Thus, my acquaintance with Adobe Illustrator was the result of despair. Yegor, he is a true martyr. He went through Corel Draw, Xara and Macromedia Fireworks, and he had yet a lot to suffer, hadn’t he chosen Adobe Illustrator. And it was only Denis the smart boy, who decided to master the vector-based thing by Adobe and even bought a book on the subject.

I’m saying all this to let you know that Adobe Illustrator is not the choice dictated by our ideology, as some might think; it is the only tool suitable for making vector-based icons. Had we the opportunity, we’d eagerly change it for something else. Illustrator would have won the first prize in the contest for the worst and most carelessly written $500-priced program. The quantity of errors stuns your mind and sometimes makes you just livid. Well, let’s not go too deep in the sad thoughts…

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Once upon a time we received a letter from Mr. Anton Tretyakov (Internet). He asked the following (we retain the original spelling and punctuation):

“Hello! Tell please in what programs I can bigin making icons. I am a designer and know basic graphic programs. I am interested in the steps of drawing.”

That’s one strange question, isn’t it? One should have looked a bit deeper and read our wonderful blog. It would have become clear that we are using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Of course, we didn’t get upset with Anton’s paying little attention to our work: his letter let us furnish our blog with a series of articles about the tools we are using.

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There is hardly ever a person who could be surprised by a convenient and nice extranet system. “Oh! You are using Basecamp! Great!” — that is what our clients tell us after they have received an invitation to visit turbomilk.seework.com. Basecamp has become a de facto standard, and 37signals, its developers, showed up as recognized gurus of web applications design and usability.

When we started using Basecamp, it felt like we are in heaven. The system simply did its job without making us think that we are too dumb to use it. A complete absence of tweaking options (except coloring the interface) turned out to be a great advantage of no necessity to spend the time and efforts to do that tweaking. Just launch — and work. However, after a year of active use of Basecamp (several dozens of accomplished projects later) I started to think we need to take a more sober look at this system.

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I should confess of being skeptical as to 3D modeling in icon design. Really, on the 32×32 or even 48×48 scales these technologies have no room to swing a cat. Simple objects are easy to draw without modeling and complex objects will be a mess anyway. Slight mistakes in perspective building are not critical, whereas it is more important to match the lines with the pixel grid which is done only manually. Shades and highlights will look better in such a limited space if a skilled hand does that instead of a machine — and not at the expense of the result!

But times, they are changing.

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Many are already aware of the cunning evil Linux users having devised a way to use vector-based icons in the GUI… What will they use to create them? Now that’s a good question! They started making their own vector-based drawing program. Linuxoids are strange, but nice and generous people. No wonder their editing program is platform-independent and free. It is called Inkscape.

As a matter of fact, this icon — the logotype of Inkscape was created with this program.

What now? Inquisitive minds go to the official web site and download the version for their platform (the Mac OS version is about 14Mb, and about 8MB for Windows) and then try to create something. All the rest go on reading.

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Why did I pay attention to this product? According to Microsoft’s idea, the Expression family of products is intended to satisfy the needs of interface designers for Windows and for web. Thus, Expression Graphic Designer (MSEGD) is to be the first tool specifically intended for designing interface graphics (except Flash, but Flash has a much more limited scope of application).

Its “brother” is the Interactive Designer, which is promised to fulfil the eternal dream of interface designers, that is, to create interfaces without the programmers’ involvement (do not mix it with RAD Tools. It had quite different objectives).

Breathtaking prospects. Launching the program…

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