The story of one project

In November last, a caricature of a foreign author hiding under the nickname the rut was published in the men's magazine Maxim. This work simply made me fall in love with me, the author managed to convey with a few strokes the complex emotions of the characters and at the same time all the humor was concentrated in the drawing and its perception by the reader, and not in the text that accompanies the image.

Having rummaged around in RuNet, I could not find the works of this author translated into Russian, and in a burst of enthusiasm for the day I collected a site on Drupal, on which I began to upload my own translations of the cartoons of this author and his comrades. The site was named therut.ru in honor of the author, whose work formed the basis of the project. Unfortunately, the rut'a’s work was only enough for two weeks of publications, and I didn’t want to quit the project I started, so I started looking for other sources of caricatures, and the two main selection criteria for me were:

• the caricature should be unique within the runet, that is, the easiest option, you need to find and transfer the work of a foreign author.
• humor should be concentrated in the drawing, not in the text; readers will prefer to go to the bash.org for textual jokes. Moreover, it is implied that the humor of the drawing is not only a funny drawn event, but also an original style or charming characters involved in the action.

Over the several months of the project’s existence, more than 300 pieces have accumulated on it (I add them at an average speed of two jobs per day, although I plan to increase this parameter to four per day in the near future) and it became clear that the rut is no longer the main author project, moreover, ambiguous perception of the name of the site by ear led me to the idea of ​​registering the domain zerut.ru as well. Thus, the idea, originally incorporated into the project, has undergone significant changes: the site has turned from a collection of works by one author into a collection of works by foreign cartoonists.
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For this reason, it was decided to make a global redesign of the site and come up with a logo / character for it that could uniquely identify the project. At this stage, my friend and designer Jura joined in the development.

The idea of ​​the logo, and subsequently the design of the site, was born quite by accident, in the process of attaching another feature to the project. Each cartoon on the site can be labeled as “obscene”, such work in the list of caricatures was originally displayed not as a reduced copy, as usual works, but as a red crossed circle (which I sketched in Photoshop for 2 minutes), warning the user about culture shock. Yura, having seen this hand-made article, unflatteringly spoke about my artistic abilities and further, being guided by the principle “you criticize - offer”, I was forced to draw my own stop-picture. One of the variants of such a picture was, pardon, the back of an elephant with a red circle crossed out at that very “censored” place:


Learn more about how to create a logo, described in the project blog .

Subsequently, the elephant received the name Zerut (it was necessary to somehow justify the new name of the site :)), and on the basis of the stop-pictures a logo, favicon, 404 error message were drawn and a very simple but most convenient design was created around it.



The site has the minimum required set of features: anonymous visitors can view images and vote for them, in addition, registered users have the opportunity to add their favorite caricatures and authors to their favorites, as well as share a link to their favorites with their friends.

A couple of interesting facts about the site:

• There are cartoons on the site with the title "Yoga for beginners." I suggested that some people might be mistaken in writing the word “yoga” in a query to a search engine, so I assigned a tag to the picture in which this word was intentionally written with an error. So, almost 30% of the transitions to the site from search engines come on-demand for “beginners’ yogi ”.
• Spammers have chosen one cartoon and post spam only in it, barely have time to remove such comments from the publication.
• Caricature with which it all began: