Computerlove™

October 23rd, 2008

Rates for Icon Design

We keep hearing from many people: “Why don't you display anywhere on your site how much your icons cost?” And we depress our eyes and mildly ask to send us an email for quoting in response. But everything changes. Turbomilk wants to be a simple and clear service. We have finally published a page with prices for our services. And we also made an FAQ page to address any issues you may have.

June 17th, 2008

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: How to draw a good icon for Google?

June 2nd, 2008

Space Invaders

If you manage your intergalactic business properly, invading and destroying some planet on your way is a piece of cake. All you might need is hyperactive gigantic squids or good old flying saucers with powerful blasters. That’s it! Off we go! Apocalypses starts here!

Despite the horrendous threat to the whole mankind Turboillustrator Eugene Artsebasov drew a set of icons featuring space invaders. A new gaping visitor of our site might murmur: "Have you all gone nuts in your Turbomilk? What’s with the aliens?"

This is an easy question! These are free icons that serve as training aids for icon design. Previously blogged series on the same subject include the following:

Drawing an Icon: Sketches and Metaphors

Drawing an icon: Creating and destroying the Earth

March 28th, 2008

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.

It turns out that for centuries there has been a whole list of names for colors and hues, and some of them are rather amusing:

Why not use these names more widely in professional design lingo? Forget soulless letters and digits like #C41E3A and R:196 G:30 B: 58, instead use a beautiful name like ‘cardinal’. It would make poetry out of designer speak. For example: “I think that the combination of light cherry text and a chartreuse background will make this composition very special. If we add some jade spots as accents, this whole thing will surely rock.”

March 18th, 2008

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! Enlarge your icons

February 12th, 2008

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: 10 Mistakes in Icon Design

January 16th, 2008

Car icons for social network

Every user of Autocadabra network owns a virtual garage where he keeps all of his vehicles. The developers approached us with a challenging task — draw icons for all the vehicles in the World. These were not plain icons but colored images so that the users could pick the right color for their vehicles.

Read the full story how create icons for all vehicles in the World.

June 9th, 2007

Illustrative icons

Large icons set for Norwegian company Storebrand.no (see attached image)

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.

Eugene Artebasov has recently joined our team of designers. He behaves in the office as a decent and even intelligent person. He has shown himself to good advantage. But let’s take a closer look at him; let’s peek at his inner world. Oh God! There are monsters inside! Many monsters! Pretty and touching monsters. Eugene’s soul is large and he is ready to share his inner monstroworld. This world has brought to life the Monsters icon set. You can use these icons to scare kids to death right on your desktop. The monsters are for free and please feel free to use them at your discretion.

And Dmitri Joukov was inspired by the world of nature and came up with a set of icons titled Animals. Why that happened and who’s the one to blame — we would not be able to tell. But we sincerely believe that no animals suffered in the process. Now we have no reason to buy expensive tickets to the zoo. Iconic animals are no worse than the real ones and come for free.

And how can you use these icon sets? There are many options and everyone will find his own way. You can assign the Toothy Flower from Monsters to your My Documents folder and your Quarterly Report.doc may inherit a Squirrel from Animals. And then you can drag the file into the folder. Such seemingly regular activity has just turned into a real drama! And we all feel sorry for the Squirrel!