Finally, dribbbled!

We were very excited about brand new Dribble website, an inspirational resource for designers showcasing their work in progress, and finally got invited there a week ago.

Our CEO Anton Zykin had uploaded a bunch recent works to Dribbble last week that resulted with more than 150 followers and buzz on Twitter. We are really happy making Dribble better and get involved in global design community.

Our art director Dmitry Tsozik is also on Dribble now. You should follow Dmitry and Anton for hottest SoftFacade’s work.

Posted at 12:48

Testing advertising efficiency

We never advertised on ad networks and search engines and all clients we have now and had before came to us through Google or by someone’s recommendation.But now it’s time to try something new way of marketing and we decided to try out Fusion Ads network, which places ads on popular creative and design websites.

All you need to start an ad campaign for your site is to send a request to Fusion Ads and design really good looking banner with brief text usually coming next to it. We purchased two ad spots and use the same ad on both of them. In addition to ad spots a “Roadblock” (24 hours only your ad is shown on the network) was purchased.

We will definitely inform you about the results/profit from Fusion Ads advertising right after the campaign ends.

The golden rule for creating a banner is to have eye-catchy image and few words about what you do and how cool it is. Further information comes to the right as plain text supplementing the banner, that makes Fusion ads banner perfect for promoting on the web.

This is how our banner looks in Tweetie (a popular Twitter client for Mac).

Thanks to Chris Bowler and Fusion Ads team for such a great advertising opportunity!

Posted at 20:24

SimpleGeo icons

Finally, we made all icons for SimpleGeo — new startup project of Matt Galligan and Joe Stump which is all about location infrastructure and augmented reality. We designed six large photorealistic icons those became the important part of company’s identity.

But there’s little story behind these icons. Matt, as a designer himself, proposed some ideas to us and we came up with the sketches illustrating the ideas.

We spent a lot of time to make every little thing pixel perfect. Moreover a lot of spicy easter eggs were hidden through the artwork. If you look closer at the icons you will find Flatirons photo (Famous mountains in Boulder, CO) and even yeti coming out of its cave. Dinosaur fossils and special “geo” enhancements of ordinary magnifying glass and swiss army knife. Fans of L.O.S.T. will be pleased with tiny details on SDK icon.

Guys loved our icons so much they printed the compass logo on their office door.

Working with Matt and Joe was great pleasure and new experience for us. We hope you will like the SimpleGeo work featured on our site. Enjoy!

Posted at 19:41

We designed icon set for Drupal 7 

Jeff Noyes of Acquia, a company developed Drupal, contacted us with request of creating brand new icon set for Drupal 7 upcoming release. We agreed to design all icons for free as a help to Drupal community.

A task was to create basic set of icons for the most common functions inside Drupal. We came up with an idea to have this set in two completely different styles: contour pictograms and colorful glossy icons. Furthermore, we decided that two sizes (24x24 and 16x16) will be great option for most cases of use.

After the feedback we got from Drupal community we created the whole set which was appreciated by Jeff and other guys from community participated in the discussion.

This set is available now for download from Jeff’s blog. Collaboration with Drupal was the great experience for us and it is the first time we worked on an open-source project, the most popular CMS in the world.

Posted at 18:42

Website updates and Tumblr theme

We have just slightly updated our website. Now it is easier to navigate portfolio, images are less weight and some minor bugs were fixed. Our website is still in Beta stage but we are working on enhancements every day.

In the nearest future a portfolio/case studies section will be added where we will show our featured work in details with description of the process.

Another addition is this blog. We believe that Tumblr is the easiest and handy blog platform, that’s why we created this custom theme.

Follow us here and on Twitter @softfacade!

Posted at 22:10

Funny and quick video tour to our offices.

Posted at 22:02

Our promo video of 2009.

Posted at 13:11

New website

We launched new website available at http://www.softfacade.com. Now we are working on Tumblr theme.

Posted at 12:18

iPhone image for websites and presentations →

To help designers and iPhone developers presenting their apps we designed high-quality image of iPhone. Both portrait and landscape images are available in Adobe Photoshop format for free download.

Posted at 21:01

Download Free Smashing Retro icon set →

This set contains ten beautiful icons in retro “vintage” style. You can use these icons for free without any restrictions. Enjoy!

Posted at 17:48