Turbomilk

Journal: Wallpaper and icons for Alfa-Bank

Yegor Gilyov — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 02:20:51 PDT

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.

For instance the flights in the open air became rather conventional but it all happened for the first time someday in history:

Not that long ago a girl driving a car was a rarity, which could obviously be described as a trailblazer:

The next picture is about the future. He is wrong who thinks that all of the great discoveries are in the past. The space awaits:

The polar explorers of Antarctica are the trailblazers of our times:

All of these pictures, and a special set of icons for the desktop are available in Downloads.

About Alfa-Bank

Alfa-Bank, the corporate treasury of the Alfa Group, is the largest private commercial bank in Russia. Headquartered in Moscow, it operates in 7 countries, providing financial services to over 40,000 active corporate customers and 5.3 million retail clients.

Journal: Characters Gallery

Denis Kortunov — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:04:02 PDT

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.

Drawing characters is rather exciting. Generally characters are requested by interesting clients with audacious projects. So we drew a few of these characters and gathered quite a collection. Now we came up with an idea of showing all of them on a single page. But how? We would what to showcase the characters in some special way! We decided to summon the forces of the old good Parallax and made pictures move with a sense of depth. So, please meet:

Identity: Bingo.ru

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:35:36 PDT

The developers of Bingo.ru online shop approached us to draw a logo for their project. The guys wanted to have a sign that would reflect the “Shopping is Fun” spirit but at the same time be “contemporary, dynamic, abstract, bright and vivid”. A precisely set task is have the way to the success! We thought about it and drew this logo:

In the process of creating the logo the client made a political decision to write the project’s name in Cyrillic letters. We supported this decision:

Later we drew a business card that takes into consideration all possible positions and means of communication:

And the favicon came as a dessert:

Bingo!

Case Studies: How we came up with and drew origami logos for LondonClasses

Denis Kortunov — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:46:02 PDT

The purpose of LondonClasses social network lies in connecting people who teach certain classes with those who need such classes. The author of the startup approached us for a logo, which would reflect the idea of trainings and display all benefits of the project. The project’s name is arbitrary, since the developers planned for several sites – one for each city or state. Examples: LondonClasses.co.uk, CaliforniaClasses.us, SanFranciscoClasses.us, BirminghamClasses.co.uk.

We started working on metaphors and looking for strong visual images that would make the message of group trainings clear. It turned out to be a rather challenging task - there are no established metaphors for training sessions that would be generic and international.

Maybe we could use three human-like figures in one logo: 1 teacher and 2 students (of opposite sexes). This would reflect the essence of classes as groups trained by some teacher with social aspect of communication between the trainees. Furthermore we could customize the figures for various categories. For instance: dancing figures for dances and a figure in lotus position for yoga, etc. Alexander Trakhimenok, project creator

We generated the first ideas:

Star factory. Reflects the idea of turning an ordinary person into a local star.

Origami. A person changes through the classes and so we came up with the origami idea - you can fold a sheet of paper into any figure. And our characters can be such figures that turn from dancers into runners and then into karate masters.

All interested parties liked the idea with origami very much and we decided on expanding on it. We tried to find a universal look: teacher and two students.

Just in case, we decided to reflect the idea of transformation. We let our student hungry for new skills turn into a bird and shoot up in the sky – transformation and development two-in-one.

Then we thought a bit more, talked to the client and created the following origami people:

Unexpectedly, we all (us and the client) realized that one logo just would not be sufficient – we need to draw a series of logos, so that each thematic site could feature its own logo but all logos would reflect the same idea. So we kept drawing.

The result came out original and stylish. Pleased with ourselves and the results we were about to have some rest but the client requested logos for yoga and salsa (the dance, not the sauce).

Icons: Qt

Denis Kortunov — Tue, 31 May 2011 04:25:27 PDT

We enjoy working with clients from Norway very much. Framebase, for which we drew a character, approached us with an order for icons. These were more like mini illustrations rather than icons. Although, do not take our word for it:

And we also drew a nice big sack with gold: