Russian ball in London

The Russian ball in honor of the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty went completely unnoticed. Few people saw the design of the coat of arms and the website of the Russian Ball, and those who saw it understood almost nothing. It was seen as a sloppy craft in the spirit of the 90s, although it was completely different: colossal work and knowledge was invested in the design.

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a headline written in italic serif and asked why the design studio was using a type from a market stall. Do you know what font the inscription was written with? It was Garamon, the oldest serif of 1530.

Then I understood everything. It seems that technology has spoiled our taste so much. After all, we have forgotten how to perceive serifs in fonts, unless it is a book spine. When was the last time you saw a screen title in serif font? Everywhere now they write ultra-bold Helvetica or what is there now in the iPhone, San Francisco?

This trend is rooted in the first computer screens, which had very large pixels. Because of this, it was not possible to beautifully display elegant serif fonts on the screen, and therefore everyone began to massively use sans serif fonts. They have straight sticks, they are easy to draw on the screen. And for fonts with serifs, they came up with anti-aliasing algorithms. This is when the pixels on the edges of the letters are made translucent to create a smooth effect.

This is how we lost serif fonts. Now any headline typed in a noble 16th-century Romanesque font looks like an inscription on a photocopy shop tent. Not only because of anti-aliasing, but also because Times New Roman is still the most popular font for ads typed in Word. Although earlier the same Garamon — the king of serif fonts — was used by Apple in advertising, in the logo, and on the Macintosh itself:

The Russian ball was last held in 1913, the year of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. It would be strange to take Helvetica for the site, wouldn’t it? That’s why I chose the Petersburg font. It is also known as “Kudryashevskaya Encyclopedic Typeface” — a long and complex name, roughly like the name of the Moscow metro lines.

Petersburg is not a pre-revolutionary font, but a Soviet one. I tried pre-revolutionary fonts when I drew drafts of the site:

It got overloaded. Yes, Clarendon, Kuzanian and the New Standard are better at capturing the spirit of that era. You can even write a title with them, but you can’t use it for typing at all: it will simply be impossible to read it. So for a long time we could not decide in what style to make the site.

Then Ilya Glazunov was connected to the project, and he drew something completely old Russian, which confused everyone even more:

When it became clear that the experiment with old typefaces had carried us too far, we decided to stop at St. Petersburg. It was a great compromise: on the one hand, the font is quite old. An inexperienced eye will not distinguish it from the pre-revolutionary one (and from the Times too), but you can type both text and headlines with it. I then realized my thirst to do something pre-revolutionary in a poster about the search for a manager in the studio. This is the purest pre-revolutionary Russian style: two dozen fonts and ridiculous dialogues.

Emblem-logo

The magnificent Mitya Paramonov took care of the logo. First, he suggested drawing the Albert Hall — this is the royal hall in London, in which the Russian ball was to be held.

Although the drafts turned out to be interesting, the logo itself had nothing to do with either the ball or anything Russian. The result was either the logo of the Albert Hall itself, or the identity of the London travel agency.

Then Mitya went nuts and swung at heraldry. I, he said, will try to combine the coat of arms and music. Strauss waltzes are played at the balls, and his silhouette is already used in other client logos, such as at the Vienna Ball in Moscow. But we won’t take Strauss himself, we’ll take his violin.

The idea was great, but we faced such a task for the first time. It was necessary to draw as it were a coat of arms, but at the same time more of a logo. Respect the basic laws of heraldry, but break those that oppose the laws of logos. Find the needed style of strokes and lines. Make a color version. And at the same time combine the shape of the coat of arms with the violin!

The next day, Mitya sent the first sketch of his idea.

I wouldn’t say that I liked it. I just didn’t understand anything. Fortunately, Mitya is very good at convincing. And a few days later he sent a new draft with a more detailed study of the coat of arms. Now it has been drawn on tracing paper, scanned and vectorized using Adobe Illustrator.

Let me explain a little what is going on here.

Coats of arms can be small, medium and large. The reader must have come across mostly small coats of arms. Most often it is just a shield in which some animal or ornament is inscribed. If we now take this shield and place knights around it, put on a hat, helmet or crown, or insert a double-headed eagle inside, we will get the middle coat of arms. Now, if we take the middle coat of arms and insert it inside the royal mantle, surround it with ornaments and many other elements that I don’t even know the names of, we will get a large coat of arms.

All three emblems are the emblems of the country at the same time, and which one to draw depends on the situation. Here is the small, medium and large coat of arms of Poland from 1815 to 1832.

To show the main details of the coat of arms, I’d rather take the coat of arms of the United Kingdom.

This lion and unicorn here are called shield supporters. The tradition of depicting them comes from medieval knightly tournaments, where several people carried a real, heavy coat of arms behind a knight. Mythical animals have come to replace people, symbolizing the spiritual forces that patronize the owner of the coat of arms.

A knight’s helmet, similar here to a stove grate, is put on top of the shield and symbolizes the owner of the coat of arms. The helmet is golden, which in British tradition indicates the royal family.

Gold-silver patterns flying from the supporters and looking either like waves or like leaves is mantling. It is used as an ornament.

Well, a shield is inserted inside the circle with the inscription. The same shield, which is simplified and called the coat of arms, although this is only part of the coat of arms.

Now back to Mitya’s draft. In the center of the coat of arms is a shield, which is shaped like a violin. Look at the two slits on the sides in the shape of an integral — on the violin they are called efs. The Albert Hall is depicted as a helmet, and the burdock around the shield is not burdock at all, but mantling in the form of leaves.

In addition, the phrase “Russian Ball in London” is inscribed on the shield. Usually, the coat of arms does not use the name, but the motto. But in our case, such subtlety is useless. The letters R and B turned out to be unreadable in the draft, but we will return to them later.

We showed this draft to the organizers. The Austrian Elisabeth was the most startled and even ran to call someone: “Look, look, he combined the coat of arms and the violin!”

Everyone liked the idea very much, but no self-respecting client ever accepts work without comments. So it happened this time too. Having looked at the coat of arms from all sides, the organizers decided that the coat of arms lacked... dancing people. And this is a complete taboo: people inside the shield are strictly prohibited in heraldry! People can just be supporters.

But never, under any circumstances, people can not be inside. Well, if this is not George the Victorious, however he did not dance a waltz, but killed poisonous snakes. It was only hoped that we would draw people so badly that the client would not like it and he would give up this idea.

Found a dancing couple, Mitya drew.

Inserted inside the shield. Oh, disgusting. Exactly what we needed.

Showed to the client. We said we can draw better, but this is not the way to treat coats of arms. Much to our happiness, Elizabeth wrinkled her nose and said: “You convinced us, let’s go without people. Are letters possible? Okay, let it be with letters”.

Letters can be placed in the shields, although it is not customary to write a long text. Usually the motto was written in the coats of arms. For instance, on the Polish coat of arms in the example was an inscription “God bless us” — this is just the motto. Or take the famous coat of arms of Harvard. Three book spreads are inscribed in it with the word VERITAS — “truth” in Latin. Under the shield is a solemn ribbon with the inscription “Harvard”.

For the coat of arms of the Russian Ball, we took the first letters of the name: R and B. Here we had to break our consistent Russophilia and use Latin letters.

There were several reasons for this decision. Firstly, coats of arms are a product of Western culture, there are very few good examples in Russia, and even more so there are no examples of working with typography. Secondly, there are very few examples of ligatures (combinations of two letters) apart from coats of arms in the Russian language. Thirdly, since the project is international, we would have to make two versions of the coat of arms. This is a strange decision. I have not heard that someone was engaged in the localization of coats of arms.

They also decided to get rid of the Albert Hall. He looked too much like an Uzbek hat. And from the point of view of heraldry, it looked like the Albert Hall is the owner of the Russian Ball.

The draft was done pretty quickly, and then the work dragged on for three months. It was necessary to take into account a huge number of nuances and think simultaneously in many dimensions.

Ligatures were being worked on. The letter R is bad, but readable from the very beginning, but the letter B came out completely unreadable. The most difficult place was the articulation of letters. It was necessary to take the right leg of the letter R and very elegantly connect it to the letter B, but how to do it? After all, the letter B is a closed one.

We tried to open the lower semi-oval of the letter B and rhyme it with the foot of the letter R. Because of this, the B turned into an e and was completely unreadable.

We were looking for another way to connect the letters. They made the letter B capital, gave it a dashing extension from above and braided it around the semi-oval of the letter R. The same technique was applied to the bottom stroke.

Look what happened: if earlier the lower half-oval of the letter B opened from above, now the gap is at the bottom. Now it already looks like the letter B, but it turned out such a mess of squiggles that the Dynamo logo even began to show through in it. You will find it if you look at the bottom leftmost part of the drawing for a long time.

A familiar calligrapher gave advice. We replaced the roof of R to make it look like in B and cleaned the mess in the right corner.

At the last step we connected R and B — here it is, the elegance!

Simultaneously with calligraphy, was developed the style of engraving hatching.

The coat of arms is not a logo, not a drawing, and not a graphic at all. In fact, the coat of arms is a code phrase written in a special, heraldic language. Take the coat of arms of the Swedish province of Värmland. It looks like this: “In silver field, an azure eagle with a scarlet tongue, beak, paws and claws.” I used the word “looks” correctly. This phrase is the coat of arms, and how it is drawn is the tenth thing. An eagle can be drawn in a hundred different ways, there can be thousands of shades of a scarlet beak, but any combination will be considered the same coat of arms.

We could choose any design for the coat of arms, but we decided to focus on the engraving technique. It seems that we really liked the logos of the Grand Imperial restaurant and the Bolshoi Theater that Lebedev drew at that time, and we wanted to do something similar.

The letters turned out to be shaded in two ways: along and across the main strokes. The transverse hatching came out very similar to the engraving of banknotes, and we took longitudinal strokes that resembled melon seeds.

When the new form of letters was inserted into the shield of the coat of arms, we realized that now the letters cannot be evenly stretched over the entire coat of arms. At the top, it turned out to be an empty place that I wanted to occupy with something: emptiness is not welcome in heraldry. On the other hand, they went too far with mantling. The result was not a coat of arms, but a violin wrapped in a head of cabbage.

We drew a new mantling, but the gap in the upper part of the shield is called a place of honor, and it had to be occupied with something... honorable. In a place of honor, heraldists often put other nested coats of arms. So we went back to where we started: London. On the commemorative one pound coin there was a beautiful coat of arms of the City of London, made in the right style. Mitya redrawn it and put it in a place of honor. Now, if the next Russian Ball takes place somewhere in Berlin, you can simply replace the coat of arms.

Assembled everything together. Came out a magnificent coat of arms, in which every detail is comprehended.

Showed to the organizers — not a single comment. This happens when the project is so complex that it makes no sense to even explain it. Not a single detail in the coat of arms can be changed without completely destroying the entire structure.

The only thing that the client asked me to do was to draw the coat of arms in color. It wasn’t a problem. The Russian Empire had a beautiful identity in the form of a black and yellow flag. We couldn’t paint over the coat of arms with black, so we turned it into brown, and made the yellow color gold, overlaying the texture of canvas paper. Such a convention is not only acceptable, but desirable. The leaves of mantling turned green by themselves, and the St. George’s cross in the coat of arms of London turned red, as in the original.

Having created a colored version of the coat of arms, we nevertheless violated one important rule of heraldry. Any color must be transmitted in black and white with the help of shading. This is a way of conditionally transferring the color of the coat of arms, in which each color turns into black strokes. Each color has its own variant of strokes.

So, according to the rules, we had to redo the black and white coat of arms, removing all the engraving from it and shading it again according to the colors.

Of course, we did not do this :-) But for small printed formats, we prepared a simplified version of the coat of arms.

Drop cap

In old books, it was customary to highlight the first letter of each chapter with an ornament — this was called a drop cap, capital or initial letter. Now the initial letter is almost never used, but it can still be found in fairy tales for children.

But this is a very bad example. The same story happened with the initial letter as with the fonts. Printing technologies have made books massive, there is no time left for decoration. If someone now undertakes to draw drop caps, then he is unlikely to understand what he is dealing with. This is why we get a bazar style, although the initial letter is a very strong trick. On this page from the Bible, the letter L takes up the entire page, you won’t immediately understand:

But this is too much for the site, and I wanted to make a drop cap. So I asked myself: what types of them even exist? It turned out that they are very different.

You can collect thousands of such pictures and look at them for hours, however design is not just about beauty, but above all about solving a problem. And the task is to make a convenient site in the Russian style, without falling into decoration.

There was a clean typographical technique without ornament. You can put lines of text along the contour of a large letter, it comes out stylish.

There was one problem: the site is not a printed book, everything is constantly changing here. The editor wants to replace the text, what then? We cannot write an algorithm that wraps around a letter automatically. We agreed with the layouter that we will manually compose line shifts for each letter of two alphabets: Russian and English. Some letters are repeated, so you get a little more than 40 options.

This diagram is from another project where we made the same initial letter. The scheme of the Russian ball has not been preserved. The point here is the same. A number is written under the letter, which means the minimum shift of the line relative to the letter, and additional shifts of each line are written to the right of the letter.

Let’s say the letter A. Below it is the number 104. Then a row of numbers to the right of the letter: 0, 15, 30, 45, 64. This means that the first line of text is shifted by 140 + 0 pixels, the second by 140 + 15 and so on.

The initial letter was used only in one section of the site, the most important one, where there was a story about the ball. In general, the whole site turned out like this: of dozens of complex techniques that were used only once. We seemed to be throwing away the resources that the client gave us.

Whole section for one letter

Design is war.

If not a war, then a small battle I launched with the organizer of the Russian Ball. Alexander Smagin asked to write the word “ball” with a capital letter to emphasize the importance of the event. This hurt my sense of beauty so much that I began to resent:

“Alexander, in Russian, the word “ball” is written with a small letter, this is part of the name. Like, for example, “Moscow state university”.
“I understand, and yet I ask you to write with a big one. Our company is called “Vienna Ball Moscow LLC”, all with capital letters. This is part of the corporate culture.”
“Then write yourself. Open the code and change to capital.”

Something fell off everybody present in the office because of such audacity: somebody dropped his cracked pince-nez from his eyes, someone had their pre-revolutionary mustaches peeled off and planned on the floor.

“But... what does this mean? Why?”
“Because the esteemed design community will devour me with giblets if I write the name of the Russian Ball in honor of the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty with a grammatical error.”

Then my business angel intervened in the dispute and saved us all from a fight, because I was already boiling over. Tete-a-tete he asked me to write a word with a capital. Of course, I silently sent layouts with a small letter. The scandal erupted with renewed vigor, and such arguments were used: they say, you can write everything in the headlines with a big one, look at Apple. “No,” I answered, “it’s in English there is such a rule, but not in Russian.”

They even connected some editors or journalists who tried to prove something to me by waving Rosenthal’s reference book, which they had not even read. Then they threatened to break the contract.

I did not care. I saw this work as one of the main ones in my life, and I could not write on the main page with an error. How then to live with such a burden? What will I say when I am in front of God?

The conflict reached a dead end and it became clear that heavy artillery had to be brought in. I have collected several reference books: Rosenthal, Milchin, and Yakov Grot, a 19th-century Russian academician of philology. I took from them all the rules that concerned the names of balls and imperial dynasties. I drew the “For the Press” section, in which I placed the logos and photos of the ball, and in it I made the “Spelling” tab, on which I wrote everything I found.

A whole section for one letter! The battle was won, the client capitulated, and the design community ignored the project.

Period at the end of headings.

When doing such work, you need to be very attentive to the little things. Not even in the sense that everything needs to be done flawlessly. No, you can be wrong. It is important to add as many references, semantic ciphers, Easter eggs as possible.

So we have already made a chic initial letter and found a yat for Dulcinea, what else? Carefully examining pre-revolutionary posters, you can see that at the end of the headlines used to always put a period.

This trick actually went out of fashion not so long ago, even the advertising of the first Mackintoshes have periods.

Yes, literacy used to be treated more carefully. After all, the title is a sentence, so a full stop is needed. But now designers are even embarrassed to put commas: they say, like, it’s ugly, clients will stop buying the goods. Well, periods will be on the website of the Russian Ball, and you can return tickets if you don’t like.

Missing yat for Dulcinea

While sorting through copies of pre-revolutionary books, I came across an interesting font used to sign illustrations and headings.

This is a handwritten font, the inscriptions were made with a quill. Look at these stretched letters with continuous connections — this is an exemplary calligraphy of the 19th century. Official letters were written in this font, but it was rarely used in print, only for short inscriptions, because it was hard to read.

I wanted to immediately use the font on the site. It reminded me of something, like if I saw it somewhere. I opened Lebedev’s website — and for sure! This is where he copied his font Dulcinea. I immediately bought a licensed version and tried it — it fit perfectly, but it turned out that there was no letter yat in the font.

Yat and er are often confused. A hard sign at the end of words is er. And the yat in shape is more like a soft sign with a crossed leg.

From this dash it gives off something Orthodox, it is very similar to a church cross. Indeed, all these ers, yats and izhitsas were written in church texts to the last, even after they were removed from the Russian alphabet. Yes, and the same verses, invented to memorize words with yat, begin like this: “Замѣшу посѣвъ въ мѣрило, Ѣду грѣхъ исповѣдать.”

The reader will easily read these verses if he replaces yat with the letter e. That is why yat was removed from the Russian language: it was mixed in pronunciation with the sound e even before Pushkin and became “a sign of difference between the literate and the illiterate.”

So I had to look for the missing yat for Dulcinea, so as not to make an illiterate site for the royal family. I didn’t know how to draw fonts then. It seemed to me that since Lebedev digitized the pre-revolutionary font, there must have been at least drafts of yat. I contacted the Studio — and did not get a response. A week later, I wrote personally to Lebedev and explained that I was conducting a case of national importance. And then in the morning I receive a letter with a special version of Dulcinea, with yat! I then jumped up in my chair with happiness. Thank you, Tema.

Pre-revolutionary UI Kit

Pictures and fonts on the site remain the same as they were on paper a hundred years ago. Only the way they are “printed” changes: instead of watercolor and ink, a luminous electronic panel is used.

This can not be said about the elements of the interface. Buttons, drop-down menus, text fields — none of these existed before the advent of the computer, although many controls had prototypes in the real world. For example, the text field is part of a paper questionnaire, and the radio button is even called that because it is taken from old radios, where it served to change waves.

Transferring real-world objects onto a computer screen is called skeuomorphism. Many designers mistakenly believe that skeuomorphism is a style of interface design that uses shadows, gradients, and textures. In a narrow sense, this is true, but in fact, skeuomorphism is generally any imitation of one another.

The shadow under the icon on the screen does not exist: it is an imitation of a real shadow. The handset icon itself is also an imitation of a real handset. And the serifs in the computer font are just an imitation of serifs from the Trojan Column. Candle-shaped light bulbs are an imitation of real candles in a candlestick. The convertible top of a modern car is an imitation of the convertible tops of old horse-drawn carts. These are all examples of skeuomorphism.

So, it was necessary to come up with a good skeuomorph for the interface elements of the Russian Ball.

The site often starts drawing from the main menu. The choice here is small: either make it at the top, or on the side, or as a burger. The side menu is made only in online stores, because there are a lot of items. The burger menu — that is, inside the three-stripe icon — is too much of a media trick that is hard to use on corporate sites. Therefore, the main menu of the Russian Ball was placed at the top.

The logo is attached to the main menu. It can be placed either on the left or in the center of the menu. This is the key decision that determines the entire composition of the site: will it be left aligned or centered? I already know the answer, but let’s look for examples of how they did it before the revolution.

Of course, this is the simplest, central composition, supported by a symmetrical coat of arms. The logo of the Russian Ball is also a coat of arms. Let’s look for something similar to the menu. Here is an example of how the inscriptions were made next to the emblems: in the form of solemn ribbons.

Pre-revolutionary advertising is a separate form of art. Before the advent of color printing, advertising was drawn in engraving technique, and posters were full of complex paintings and patterns.

I saw the ribbons and engraving style in these old advertisements, and Mitya Paramonov drew a special shape ribbon and adapted it for the main menu.

For a long time we’d been chosing the style of arrows and mustaches for decorating headlines, which we sorted through the old catalog of symbols.

Mitya painted all the elements in engraving technique. The arrows turned out like the tips of a spear, the mustaches left the usual shape.

The hardest part was the text fields, the shape of the button and the slider for the audio turned out by itself.

Like it? Have you ever seen a pre-revolutionary UI Kit?

Romanovs and Albert Hall

For the site, we decided to make a page with a short history of the Romanov dynasty. The text was written by the organizer, and the design had to be invented. I wanted to find some original portraits of tzars, not from history books. There were several pre-revolutionary albums with pictures of almost all members of the royal family.

The page turned out to be a long sheet. This is good: article, book format.

The ruling Romanovs, as you know, were shot by the Bolsheviks, but the rest of the family still lives in the same London where they planned to hold the Russian Ball.

The venue for the ball is the Royal Albert Hall. This is such a super-prestigious concert hall, known all over the world. A kind of Bolshoi Theatre, only about music. Once Richard Wagner himself performed here, Albert Einstein gave a lecture and Led Zeppelin gave a farewell concert. “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” — the Beatles sang, making fun of the big asses who love to sit in the Albert Hall.

An old painting was found for the Albert Hall, where horse carts ride around the building.

We took this picture as a background for a short page dedicated to the Albert Hall. In Russia, few people have heard about this place, so it was necessary to tell where the ball was held.

Mihailo Zichy

The Russian Ball was held for the first time in 100 years, so the organizer sent photos of another event — the Vienna Ball in Moscow. We looked at them, tried to place in site. Nah.

Let’s go look for photos of Russian balls. And then there was already a color photograph? Of course it was. Prokudin-Gorsky photographed in color as early as in 1903. Maybe he filmed something at the ball? No, not a single photo of the Russian ball was found.

I asked Mitya Paramonov: “Mr. court king of arms, do you know any court painter who painted balls?” — “If you please, Mihailo Zichy”.

There was a painter of Hungarian origin who painted a chronicle of events at the court of Alexander II. He was also called not a painter, but a draftsman — a great honor. So, Mikhail Zichy painted a large series of paintings from the coronation of the king to all kinds of balls.

We tried to use his paintings — and yes, this was what we needed!

Showed to the organizer, and he was like: “Yes, Zichy was a wonderful artist, and his picture fits perfectly. But I ask you to post a photo too, the picture does not reflect the essence.” What now, shall we split the screen in half? Geez.

By the way, this is a common problem. The client likes his original idea, you show him the idea even better — and instead of replacing it, he asks to implement both at the same time. When this happens, you need to first see if there are other problems nearby. There is clearly something in this layout: the title inscription is small, it does not fit the great picture at all. That’s great, you need to solve both problems at once.

One of the most effective techniques in design: find a problem, blow it up even more, bring it to the point of absurdity, and imagine that this is how it should be. The inscription did not fit — fine, let it go beyond the screen. Let’s make it two-screens and apply the parallax effect. It’s when the background moves slower than the foreground.

Storyboard:

Now we need to somehow give a look at the photo. We continue our slideshow and make two more of the same slides, only with a photo. If you click the arrow on the second slide, the effect with the caption is repeated, but with a modern photo.

The result was a “before and after” effect: the picture represents a ball 100 years ago, the photograph — today’s ball. Some sort of time portal.

Here is a storyboard of all four slides:

Video of the effect:

It came out very cool. The inscription “Russian Ball” against the background of a real Russian ball at the royal court, and the second part — “in London” — against the background of modern photography. It’s not from London, of course, but who knows?

Thanks Zichy! We will make a separate section about you on the site. Other pictures are used in the remaining sections. The artist’s works turned out to be so good for the Russian Ball that there was a feeling that Zichy, like Misha Lenn, painted them especially for the site.

Performance at the Bolshoi Theater on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander II. The picture was perfect for the Tickets page.

Breakfast of Wilhelm I and Alexander II. The conversation between two emperors is a great metaphor for the Contacts section.

Misha Lenn and his paintings

In addition to Ilya Glazunov, watercolor artist Misha Lenn was involved in the project.

I don’t understand anything in art, and I heard about Mr. Lenn for the first time. I read about him. It turned out that his paintings are in the collections of Gorbachev and Malkovich, and he is also the owner of an Oscar as the best watercolorist in America. And so he painted a picture for the Russian Ball, and this picture was sent to me so that I could put it on the main page of the site.

But how do I put it? This is a website, not an exhibition. The site should have a logo, menu, text, buttons. All this should be readable, but nothing can be read on such a vivid painting. Of course, we can do like this:

but what for? We’ll spoil both the panting and the text. I had to get into a pose again and politely explain why it would not work to put the painting on the site and that we already have a good style with Zichy’s paintings:

“But Misha must be somewhere on the site!”
“He will be somewhere!”

I made a separate page for Misha with a short story and examples of his paintings. It’s much better than a picture without a caption on the front page, isn’t it?

Well, and since we made such a page for one person, then it’s good to make it for everyone. This is how a whole series of pages appeared on the site: about the project sponsor Natalya Kasperskaya, court painter Mikhailo Zichy and watercolorist Misha Lenn.

Everyone liked this option, and then at a ball in London I had a chance to face Misha face to face:

“So you are the website designer? What’s the story with my painting?”
“You see, it didn’t fit. But, I ordered to make a separate page about you.”
“Damn it, I like you.

Ticklish moment.

Dinner menu and the programme

The two most delicious pages of the site are the dinner menu and the ball programme. There are many examples of old theater and restaurant posters in the archives.

The Russian Ball programme page was created following the example of old posters and timetables. There is not a single picture on it, the work is exclusively type. And how good it looks!

On the menu page, this technique did not work: it was necessary to show photos of dishes. For the Russian Ball, dishes were prepared according to recipes that were used at the royal court of Nicholas II. One of these dishes is pheasant with apples. It seems that the famous showman and culinary specialist Renat Agzamov was in charge of the kitchen, so the dishes turned out to be truly royal.

But the photos, it seems, were taken on the phone, so I will show the dinner page only at the top. The lower part, where the photos go, is not appetizing.

Secret basement with concealed sections

When assembling the site, a question arose: where to put all these pages? There are clearly more of them than could fit on the menu.

It is believed that site navigation should be clear and obvious to any visitor. Generally yes, but not always. So to speak... If the page with the sale of tickets is not visible, then this is very bad. Still if not such important pages are hidden, but some kind of additional ones, then this is even good: the first visitor does not need them, and the one who visits the site many times will find them sooner or later.

One of my acquaintances even suggested that if a user finds a hidden section on the site, then it creates for him an emotional connection with the site. He begins to think that he is privy to something secret as a reward for liking the site and spending enough time on it to find the hidden sections.

I applied this philosophy on the site of the Russian Ball, placing all the secondary pages in the footer. And there is no way to get to them except through the basement.

Since then, I have been applying this concept in all my own projects, where I am not pressured by a client with his whims.

Project’s fate

The Russian Ball was held in London, in the royal hall of the Albert Hall, December 2, 2013. The ball was attended by members of the Romanov family, famous composers and musicians, ambassadors of Russia and Great Britain. One hundred and twenty debutants took part in the dance program.

The press greeted the ball coolly. It seems Afisha wrote that the ball was like a high school graduation. The guests got drunk and climbed onto the dance floor to dance Russian dances. Well, yes. It was like this.

Balls were given five times every year since then, until relations between Russia and the West finally deteriorated.

The site was created for about 6 months at the beginning of 2013. The project budget amounted to 25 thousand dollars, unthinkable at that time, which were paid in the form of salaries and did not imply profit (with a profit, the project would have cost about 65 thousand dollars).

The site existed until the end of 2014, then the organizer of the ball and the investor quarreled over copyrights, and the site was redesigned. In the new version of the site, which was probably worked on by a much more professional designer than me, all the wishes of the customer were taken into account. The word “ball” was written with a capital letter, the secret sections and capital letters were removed, and Misha Lenn’s picture was finally placed on the main page.

What a beauty! Everything according to the guidelines, everything according to the documentation, without arguing, wars for the letters, endless disputes and strange decisions. The client must have been very pleased that he had found such a good, obedient designer.

Design is war. And another battle of this war was lost.