Blog: Behind the Scene
Wallpaper and icons for Alfa-Bank
Alfa-Bank decided to please its clients, partners and employees with beautiful computer wallpaper and icons and approached us with this task. “Alfa means first”, — we thought and decided to devote the illustrations on the wallpapers to the trailblazers in various areas of human activity.
Characters Gallery
As you might have already noticed, we position Turbomilk as a studio perfect for drawing icons and interfaces without any other aspects of graphical works. In fact, we are clearly more than that. The only thing required from our client is the message: it should be as clear and simple as possible. Some time ago (rather long time ago) we started inventing and drawing characters. This is a traditional direction for studios that are involved in advertising but in the web and interface context it is a new direction.
SoftFacade vs. Turbomilk
In honour of WordPress’s thousandth theme, sold in ThemeForest (a huge graphic design store for websites and blogs), a competition for the best themed icon set has been organized. We had to draw WordPress-themed icons and compete with our colleagues from St. Petersburg Softfacade.
Spring background for LiveJournal
Spring is in full swing. To make it even warmer and more joyful, we drew the spring background for the LiveJournal service. Green grass, blue sky and turbolaunchers are made by our designer Alexandr Pavlov. Enjoy!
Free icons for Livejournal
Sometimes ago we participated in a competition for new icons for the Livejournal interface that we successfully failed, so to speak. You know how this happens. However we have the icons left now. We decided to place them until the later times and available for free.
Updates to “About us”
We have updated our “About us” page – now it is largely devoted to our team. You can learn interesting facts about each of our staffers and you can rest assured that all of them are rather nice-looking (here is an insight on the photo shoot). Check out the list of all Turbomilk accounts in social networks and friend us everywhere. Also, each completed project in our portfolio is undersigned by each respective Turbomilker involved in it.
How we landed up on Channel One
A film crew of Channel One — the most prominent and popular channel in Russia — has recently visited our office. The reason for the visit was to record the story about how we thought up and drew the characters for the 2014 Sochi Olympics mascot contest. The main heroes of the report — Igor and Eugenia — were a bit worried and excited but pull themselves together and told us about the creative process.
Google Developer Day 2010, Moscow
On November 12 Moscow hosted the traditional Google Developer Day, which I gladly visited.
Turbomilk photo session at PhotoPark
We have a page on our website where you can learn about the whole company and each Turbomilker individually. But there is just one tiny problem with it – it has not been updated for quite some time. Also, the pictures on it are not really cool. We’d rather have something more professional.
Update on 404 Fest held October 9-10, 2010
Better late than never! 404 Fest was a real success! All employees of Turbomilk have contributed all of their souls and efforts into organizing the event. We have spent some quality time and are grateful to all the participants who came to the fest or drove a long distance to be with us. The festival was absolutely colossal!
And also check out the updates we made to the Rabbit-no-way page in our portfolio. We added some images and pictures there.
Turbomilk’s site won the Cobbler with Shoes award
On October 20, 2010 Moscow hosted the “Cobbler With Shoes” award ceremony — the first award in Russia and CIS republics to give prizes to web agencies and design studios. Our cozy and pleasantly looking site won the “Best Service Presentation” nomination, took a special prize for “Precise Company Positioning” and also entered the short list for “Best Communication” and “Best Web Agency Site” nominations.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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articles10 Mistakes in Icon DesignJing Cai: I am working on a UI design for a business intelligence system app now. I have designed certain icons for different department of my company, different functions icons. I would like to share my Ideas for you about how to design a icon. 1. Keep your icon design sample. By Anna Jing Cai Life is hard. don’t make your life and others people’s life more complicate. As a designer your job is make life become easier than before. When I finish any icon design, I will give it to my 10 years old students, if they can understand what you designed, you are succeed. 2. Use current logo or icon to design your new icon. By Anna Jing Cai Sorry for the indigestibility…. For example, You are going to put Microsoft excel icon in to your app, you can’t change their icon too much. The first reason is copy right. second reason is people have already have a excel icon’s original picture in their mind. It is difficult to relate other icon design in this case. Maybe you still need to keep the shape of the icon, or maybe keep the color of the icon to your new icon design. Remember that people are liable to judge others from their own first impressions. And they always think the first one is the best design once they have the first image in their mind. For more information about icon design or UI design, pleast stop by our blog: http://annajingcai.com/
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articles10 Mistakes in Icon Design@glyfx: Thanks for the intelligent discussion Denis. This following bookmark is an invaluable resource and a must for any serious icon designer: A MONSTER LIST of Style Guides and UI Guidelines http://www.theuxbookmark.com/2010/08/interaction-design/a-monster-list-of-ui-guidelines-style-guides