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TurboMilk

Visual interface and icon design

Web sites: DribblerNovember 18

Our dear friends from Thematic Media once tasked us to draw layouts for Dribbler, social network for soccer fans. This network serves for publishing multimedia contents, discussing matches, rating players of favorite teams, forecasting match results and much more.

We have several templates that we tried using for modeling the layout for soccer fans' networks but we ended up with crap. Your GUI kungfu is able to produce far better stuff and we want Dribbler to really rock :)

Denis Kryuchkov, Thematic Media

We decided to make light text-based design with minimum graphics and with large headlines. For a real soccer fan the juicier the content, the better and all bells-and-whistles can wait.

Site's home page

Dribbler's hallmark is the information board similar to the one of a real stadium. Sometimes it displays truly valuable information in a specially designed font.

And sometimes, not so valuable:

Characters: Brain Slug for HabrNovember 14

Even on such web resource as Habrahabr it happens that a visitor finds himself on a page that does not exist. In this case the server sends a 404 error message. In order to somewhat sweeten the troubled user, we decided to draw a funny picture.

People at Habr love UFOs and Futurama cartoon series. So we have picked the plot for the picture where a habrauser is attacked by a brain slug. (drama)

Brain Slugs are small, the size of a fist, single-eyed aliens of fluorescent-green color. They try to get on top of a man's head and once there, they assume total control over the individual. Once the slug is removed from the head, the victim momentarily returns into his normal condition.

Beside the presence of a slug on top of the head, an invaded victim can be easily recognized due to monotonous voice and the manner of addressing himself in the third person. Having gained the control over a person, the brain slug tries to manipulate him to maximize the invasion of his mates over the largest number of victims possible. Brain slugged people have even organized their own political party with the main agenda to make huge transfer of funds in favor of the Brain Slug planet and complete global infestation.

Cookbook: What icons are forNovember 6

You would not believe it but in 1985 Apple asserted an idea in its developers' guide to replace text messages with icons wherever possible. As though icons would be more clear to a novice user than words. Of course this is bollocks. It is much easier to express any idea in words.

So, unless you are designing an interface for a graphics editor, a picture is worth a thousand words as the saying goes.

Lower 6 icons clearly display the results of using the respective tools.

Such approach is also applicable in CAD/CAM and architectural software as well as other WYSIWYG-based interfaces. But how often do we, humble GUI designers from Samara, engage in such projects? I confess, not really often. The truth is that in the modern digital world we more often deal with things without any visual incarnation at all.

Real-life example: Forming document icon for a legal software package. It describes a document that contains a reference to another document to be replaced with a newer edition by making such and such changes. Great, is it not? It is hard to describe it even in a full-size sentence. And it is even harder to grasp at once. Perhaps

Journal: Our Clients is all we gotOctober 31

Our clients are the most wonderful people. We are grateful to them for becoming what we are in our market arena. As a token of appreciation we made this page devoted to them. (Frankly, we that page before but we have completely reworked it and while doing that we felt kind of nostalgic.)

Cookbook: Supermarket interface or Cart 2.0October 29

When I visit a supermarket I sometimes engage in somewhat indecent activity amidst endless shelves with groceries. I like to peek into other people's carts. I observe what other people buy. But it is not some useless habit. Sometimes I happen to like some buyers and I pick the same products from shelves. This way I have discovered for myself a range of tasty products and many extraordinary but useful things.

And what if we add some web 2.0 into a conventional supermarket? What if we turn it into a hi-tech activity. Clearly one of the main attributes of a supermarket is a cart. So let's start the cart evolution.

A cart consists of a handle, a basket and a set of wheels — we are going to leave all that but add some new features to make it contemporary and even more useful:

• A touch-screen. In the future all the things will have touch-screens;
• We build in a wi-fi adapter or its analog to wire all the carts into a LAN;
• We label all the products with tags that can be read remotely. We place a scanner inside the cart to identify whether a product item is inside the cart once we place it there.