Turbomilk

Characters: Rabbit for 404 Festival

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:36:00 PDT

Our company is the organizer of 404 Festival held in Samara every fall. The event is remarkable from all perspectives except for one – it did not have a mascot until now. We felt like fixing it and created a special character for the fest.

We haven’t been thinking for too long and picked Rabbit-no-way for our mascot. Why so? Read about it in our article on “How we came up with and drew the mascot for 404 Festival”. And here is the Rabbit posing in all of its glory:

Lurking Rabbit is up to no good.

This Rabbit is a head biter.

Body-size Rabbit for hugging.

Master-class: How we came up with and drew the mascot for 404 Festival

Evgeniya Rodina — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:21:29 PDT

In the coming fall the next (third in a row) festival of web developers, Internet evangelists, designers and other supporters of the industry will be held in Samara. You are welcome to learn more about the event, its history, organizers and participants here and this article talks about the mascot we developed for the upcoming event.

Historically, the festival is held under the name of 404 error. For those of you keen to learn about the error hit this Wikipedia link , and we'd rather get back to the mascot.

Any user is familiar with this feeling of annoyance caused by the browser loading an empty page stating that the requested URL was “Not found”. Oops! Nothing, nada, zip. The browser sort of hints at your bad luck making you quip: NO WAY! Not surprisingly, the whole situation is begging for a special character.

abbit-no-way has been widely acclaimed throughout Runet. A brief history of the beast is described here. To make things clear, let’s just say it is a cunning and rather dangerous creature ruining all plans and perspectives. The Rabbit’s feats range from sinister quirks to biting heads off (Ouch!)

This is the original Rabbit as you might have guessed :)

And this is a true-to-life comic strip telling us about the Rabbit's deeds :)

The organizers of 404 festival rightfully believed that there could not be a better mascot for the event than the Rabbit, so the designers went to rendering the character. It’s worth mentioning that the author of the original Rabbit-no-way approved our use of the idea within the framework of the festival.

Originally we cherished the idea of drawing our own version of the Rabbit. We even thought about creating a creature with just a slight resemblance to a rabbit: long ears and cutting teeth but still radically different from the original. We even pondered over making it green or striped as zebra!

The most important about the sketch was teeth and grabbing paws! But we had to trash this idea, since it would require going into explanations to the Internet public on the relationship of this weird monster to the aforementioned Rabbit-no-way.

The main thing was to convey the cunning and devilry of the Rabbit, its suspiciousness and funny fervor, hence is the attention to face details and the eyes. And, of course, the teeth that the beast will use to crash plans and high hopes.

After a short meeting colleagues have picked version No. 5 and the work went to rendering in color.

The character went out great and everyone liked it, so we rendered two more angles. Now we have a Rabbit in a head biting mode. Beware, it is extremely dangerous, keep off the monitor or it will bite your head off! :)

This one is reaching out. Here is how it ruins your plans!

And now, the final version of the Rabbit – fierce and atrocious monster rearing on its back pads like a grizzly, stomping on all your dearest hopes and trampling over even faint expectations!

We tried emphasizing on the ravenous incisors but later traded them for a set of common molars.

Sketches…

…and light!

Turbomilk considers this its duty to warn you on any possible consequences — should your plans fail to get implemented be sure that Rabbit-no-way was somehow involved in the matter!

We warned you, so don’t go around saying: NO WAY! :)

Journal: Userpic for the country’s main twitter

Dmitri Joukov — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:12:41 PDT

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.

One warm spring evening we received a letter from Artyom Heller, the Creative Director of OKBuro.ru asking us to create a userpic for the President’s twitter. A userpic to be really proud of for ourselves and for the country. Of course, I dropped whatever I was doing and plunged into studying heraldic documents worryingly sifting through them with my shivering hands. Then I used Illustrator to draw the coat of arms in the requested small size.

We even succeeded in improving the image of Russia in the eyes of the global community. Here is a clear proof:

The hardest part was not to blurt it out prematurely. The wait was worth it: now my parents have finally realized what their son is up to and are really proud of me.

Icons: Partouche

Denis Kortunov — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 05:56:01 PDT

French company Partouche owns a network of casinos and hotels all across Europe. Today the company operates 55 casinos in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Tunisia. Such a luxurious company needed luxurious icons, so they came to us, who would have thought.

Each icon comes in four sizes (512×512, 48×48, 32×32, 16×16) featuring astonishing level of detail and affection.

Casino icons and all related items:

Balls of various shape and use:

Sports icons:

Various icons for the site:

Icons: Badges for Habr

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:22:33 PDT

“Why don’t you draw us some badges!” – told us our friends from Habr. “No problem! We’ll get right to it!” – we responded - "BTW, what are the badges?” Later we learned that badges are some sort of pins just like icons that are used for awarding users for their merits.

Badges represent a system of awards available to habr-users for decorating them for certain achievements. Badges are given automatically and are visible in the users’ profiles. Help Manual / Harbahabr

We were given a list of possible badges:

Author. User with over 10 published topics; rating of each topic should be over 50 points.
Star. User with over 20 published topics; rating of each topic should be over 50 points.
Legend. User with over 30 published topics; rating of each topic should be over 50 points.
Commentator. User with 5 posted comments; rating of each comment should be over 50 points.
Old-timer. User registered earlier than 3 years ago (at the time of measuring) with karma over 100.
Podcaster. User with over 5 habred podcasts.
Translator. User with over 5 habred translations.
Humorist. User with over 5 published topics in the “Humor on site” section.
Troll. User with karma less than -100.
Habred. User with karma over 0.
Habred-out. User with karma less than 0.

We spent quite some time thinking about badges: should they be like icons or medals or something else. Later Captain Obvious visited us opening our minds: we will draw badges as pins by using graphics with names! Why simple solutions come so hard?

In the process of sketching we were not completely sure about the metaphor for the Old-timer's badge and we approached our colleagues from Thematic Media for help:

Here is our condition: Old-timer. User registered over 3 years ago (at the time of measuring) with karma over 100. In the essence these are very good and loyal Habr-users. Respected users. And the current version of the old-timer appears as an fluffy ET holding a sign when converted into vector.

Maybe you should work from something more manly, since these users have been around for over 3 years with karma over 100 and with respect gained from other users. We are talking about a handful of people who should not be ashamed of their badges but rather be proud of it. Maybe it will be a thousand times more obvious in curves but, guys, please avoid something as weird as this picture:

Laurentiy Kutsia, Thematic Media

As a result we drew the following sketches:

Once the sketches got approved, we carefully drew all the badges in the delicate Habra-palette:

You can take a look at the badges “in real life” in the list of people or in each individual habr-profile.