Art. Lebedev Studio
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The Art. Lebedev Studio is the largest design company in Russia, founded in 1995 by Artemy Lebedev. They create both industrial and graphic design; their motto is "Design will save the world." As of 2005, they have six principal art directors and over 100 employees.
History and work
The studio began with graphic design, then expanded to include interfaces, web design, and most recently industrial design. It has its own educational center, a publishing house, a media department, and several software teams.As a policy, the studio works only for commercial entities and doesn't accept work from private citizens and potical, governmental or religious organizations.
The studio's website
At the studio's official website is available in Russian, French and English. A particular attention is given to typesetting, as if it was a printed book - for example, punctuation marks and the characters Ф, О, C, Т, Л, Я, G, Q, W, V, t, f, т, 1 and 0 are rendered several pixels to the left when they are at the beginning of a line (using Cascading Style Sheets) because they have parts that extend to the left and moving them improves flow and readability.The website also provides an insight into its design concepts. Examples of work in the portfolio are often explained in detail - what were they supposed to signify and how exactly they are supposed to make the subject more accessible to the target public.
On the Russian version of the site free technical advice in HTML, XML, XSLT, JavaScript, CSS and other web techonologies is dispensed from the knowledge accumulated by the studio desginers.
Hiring contests
The studio periodically advertises open hiring contests on its website. Candidates are offered to demonstrate their skills in an original manner. For example, graphic designers were offered to retouch a photograph of an immobile crashed car to make it look like it's completely fixed and moving on a highway. Job offers for web designers are often hidden as easter eggs on the website or comments in HTML.Web design
In Russia, the studio is largely known for its web design projects. According to their founder, their biggest contribution to this field has been the invention of scalable web sites, in which key images compress or expand to accommodate available space.Their most popular work may be Yandex, Russia's biggest search engine.
Industrial design
In May 2005, Samsung released the Sweetheart microwave oven designed by the studio. At that time it was unusual for such a large corporation to hire a Russian design firm. The studio recently received extensive media coverage for the prototype Optimus keyboard, a computer keyboard with OLED displays on every key.External links
- [Official web site]
- [The firm slogan], in 84 languages, rendered in their own [Artemius typeface family].
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