True Stories: Secrets from Chef

How to draw an icon. Minimization process

So get your magnifying glasses handy — we continue! After long and feisty arguments (do not worry — no blasters involved) we have 3 approved icons sized 64×64. Further starts the work that requires attention and patience but its end result will be seen by the Alien Invaders much more often (as it happens in the process of evolution they did not enlarge the screens but worked on improving their eyesight). Now we will grab your attention with the proper method of drawing small icons.

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How to draw a good icon for Google?

Not so long ago we berated the new Google icon and called it bad. But denouncing something that is not yours is easy! But what icon would be good? We decided to answer this question: let’s take four designers and make them draw a good icon for Google. Such approach we call running ‘a creative boutique’.

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Why the new Google favicon is bad?

A few days ago I visited the site of my favorite search engine and saw a new icon in the URL line. My first thought was that I misspelled the URL but then it occurred to me that Google had changed its favicon. I do not reckon it’s some kind of world-shaker for the whole IT industry but to me — an GUI designer — this fact appealed as rather interesting.

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Fancy color names or Royal Blue

It all started when our client wrote, seemingly as an afterthought: “Please change the color of the icon to royal blue.” To tell you the truth, this request struck me as rather unusual. We have dark blue, light blue and ordinary blue, but no royal blue that I knew about. So I did some research.

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Enlarge your icons

A small icon is OK! It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it’s not a big deal. Icons can even be very small or plain tiny. This has been their iconic fate. For many years it was the reality and everyone was happy. But something went wrong. All of a sudden, icons got big!

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10 Mistakes in Icon Design

It is much easier to criticize somebody else’s work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16×16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design…

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My GTD experience: emptying my inbox with GTDInbox

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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My GTD experience: emptying your head

I wanted to share my own experience in organizing my life in accordance with GTD for a very long time. You have most likely heard about the GTD. However you have probably missed the book under the same name. I would definitely recommend everyone to read this book. Nevertheless I will try to tell you my story so that some of the methods comprising the theory would be clear to you even without reading the book.

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All you wanted to know about TurboMilk but were too shy to ask

Our zealous readers must remember how we hosted our dear guests from Dominion this July. And prior to that we had paid a visit to that wonderful studio ourselves where we were treated with some tea and a Q&A session. So, what kind of questions can site builders have to interface designers? Luckily we got all the moves on paper and nothing will prevent us from sharing it.

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How to change icons: guidelines for inducing coziness

It would not come as a surprise for you that a man always tries to arrange his living within the bounds of his personal idea of beauty: the Amber Room or new IKEA rug, freshly painted cave painting next to the fireplace or a stuffed stuffed sword fish in the conference room — no principal difference here. The motive is always the same.

TurboMilk is happy to help the mankind in its aspiration to make the world a better place and to increase the enthropy to a whole new league. Do you remember our outstanding collections of free icons?

Some still ask how they can change one icon to another. The answer is easy. The most complex thing about it is to come up with a name for a sleepy walrus and what about that golden altar from the Monsters set. Let's suggest that our test object is the Annual Reports folder.

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Optimizing Adobe Illustrator: thrusting to the Earth orbital velocity

I have once expressed my regrets about the quality of Adobe Illustrator as a software package. The speed at which this beauty eats up the system resources is mind boggling! Drawing the first icon you are pleased to learn how fast it happens. But gradually with each new layer (object, raster or vector effect…) Illustrator slows downs and shifts into the idling mode. Since in the very beginning you do not mention it, later you hope that the reboot will “fix the problem”. However things just get worse.

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Drawing an icon: Creating and destroying the Earth

Last time we finished off with sending sketches to the Invaders corrected and refined according to their comments. The invaders had a lot of discussions and tentacle waving. While they were killing the time all of their Gigantic Assault Squids contracted the Space Pox and died. Oops! There goes the bio-weaponry. The good old methods proved to be more reliable. So the decision was made to invade planets using flying saucers with powerful blasters like in good old times.

While the invaders still have their saucers up and flying, we decided to draw the Earth invasion icon first.

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Physics still matter, even with special effects

Sharp-sighted Craig Hockenberry from the Iconfactory have spotted the inconsistency between the new 3D Dock and the old good Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Craig draws our attention to the fact that the sidelines of the Dock’s surface are sloping at different angles than the sidelines of the imaginary desk where the application icons are lying in the guidelines:

The floor displayed on the Dock does not use the perspective of the desk in front of you, nor does it appear as a shelf. Because there’s a difference between the floor angles and the traditional desktop icon angles, many icons look wrong.

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Drawing an Icon: Sketches and Metaphors

Rejoice, our young fans of digital miniature! The festival has finally come to your town. TurboMilk in my person is starting a series of posts on how we draw icons: from the moment of placing the task and receiving an advance payment to sending the final versions to the customer. Eugene Artsebasov, our illustrator, was so kind to assist me.

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Designing an iconic language

Last fall I made a brief report at a conference organized by RusCHI and 1C in the context of celebrating the World Usability Day. I was talking about designing a user interface icon language. Following the “better later than never” principle, I hereby bring the same report to your attention in the form of text with illustrations.

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Showing your cards, or why Windows is not MacOS

For many Mac OS X users Expose is the most favorite interface feature. And deservedly so, since it is very efficient and convenient for toggling between windows.

No wonder that Expose is often presented as a key advantage of Mac OS interface over Windows. “Ha-ha, looks as though Redmond tried to copy Expose but tripped over the limited capacity of its graphical engine,” some may quip. “They must be afraid of being accused of direct plagiarism,” others say. Is that so? Let’s try to investigate.

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Bestiary

Sometimes our designers get tired of traditional interface art and get lured by something off-beat. Do not go for any second thought, everything it quite straight.

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Who pecked all the crumbs, or why MacOS is not Windows

Finder serves as a file manager in MacOS X. Its main problem is that it does not give the user the sense of location.

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Cone Gradient in Adobe Illustrator. Episode Three: Happy End

You still can produce a normal cone gradient in our beloved Illustrator. This process was uncovered in konischer-verlauf.zip file with a description in German, and, I believe, many of you have already downloaded and thoroughly studied it. In general my note repeats all of what’s contained in this file, however, in English and with a few extra comments to clear up on things.

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“Circumcision”, a children’s holiday

Let’s recall the operating systems of the last century — the range of MS Windows up to 2000, Mac OS up to version 9. All of them supported only icons with one-bit transparency. Fortunately, the industry is moving ahead and the modern operating systems nowadays use the eight-bit transparency. However, for the sake of back compatibility Microsoft has recommended to include resources with one-bit transparency into icons made for Windows XP. With time the tinkering with turning the modern eight-bit transparency into one-bit was romantically coined “cutting edges” among icon designers. Today, I am going to talk about this “tinkering”…

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