2010
Web designer

These are the kind of stories that are nice to warm your memory with. I was hired as the first web designer at Izvestia - and I created the very first web version of the newspaper. An office on Pushkin Square, the legendary Izvestia building, heavy doors, brass signs, and the feeling that you are launching a new layer of reality on top of the old press.
I barely found the first screen of the main page somewhere on the rubble and old disks

Then I worked in Photoshop: assembled layouts, cut with the Slice tool, exported pictures, carefully signed files and packaged everything for transfer to development. The developers sat in another place - I gave them the grid, typography, block logic, and then together they brought it to a live portal. The most important thing was that the headlines were readable, the feed “breathed,” and the front page on the web felt as weighty as a paper one.

The Izvestia building where I worked

I remember the corridors of Izvestia to the smallest detail: the smell of paint, worn railings, conversations of editors - the old Soviet spirit of the press was still in the air. The salary was given out at a window in a dark corridor: a queue, a signature, the crunch of an envelope - and back to the layouts. Sometimes, to clear my head, I went to Tverskaya and looked into the very first McDonald's - it was my own little ritual.

Driving home in my favorite Burton jacket and sketching

I lived on the Bibirevo metro station back then: long trips, headphones, a notebook with sketches of interfaces. There was a feeling that we were truly pioneers: taking a large newspaper to the Internet and reintroducing it into people’s daily feeds.

The main habit I have retained from that job is respect for the speed of news, a clear hierarchy and the responsibility of the front page, whatever it may be - paper or digital.