Got online back in the past millennium and jumped in right away (suffice to say that my first site went live in 1998 – sadly, not a trace of it remains). Below are archives of my early sites – not for show, just for the record. They’re obsolete now, so I’ve left them as simple ZIP files rather than re-deploying them. All in Russian, by the way.
Last interview
2015
Over the years, as a “known expert,” I was occasionally interviewed — always with disastrous consequences. My words were routinely twisted in the silliest of ways. The last straw came with the iPad in 2010. Speaking with a journalist, I have wondered about the reason why there is no even semi-hidden support for the cursor (which would fit the device for many more tasks*). The published quote turned into “the iPad is bad, as there is no cursor”, which opened me to bouts of ridicule. That cured any remaining vanity.
I have stopped talking with professional journalists, but remained open to everyone else. Here’s the last interview I gave (to the open amateurs), more or less verbatim.
* It finally came out in 2020.
The culture of Design
2014
The first version of Culture of Design ebook. The book deals with the preconditions of good design, be it industrial (chair etc.), graphic, or web design.
Currently unavailable, as version 2 is much better in every way possible.
User interface design 2. The art of elephant washing
2008
I was unhappy with the previous book and decided to rewrite everything. The previous book was about which UI rules to follow. This one was about which goals to set for the project and how not to blow it up.
Again, revisited it recently: samples are obviously dated, the message
less so.
Originally also a PDF (but nicely optimised for screen
reading — again, iPad came only two years later, so for desktop).
Later converted it to Epub.
User interface design
2001
I happened to write the first original book on UI design in Russian. It became popular — likely because it was free. The book therefore provided the starting point for countless Russian-speaking UI designers.
Revisited it recently: very outdated, often silly. Still part of my history.
Adobe FrameMaker. Training course
2001
With my father, I wrote a manual on Adobe Framemaker 6, especially covering its use with Cyrillic. A quarter of a century later, there is still no comparable tool to design and publish really complex paper books. Sad! Alas, the book is out of print. Also sad!
Blog
2000-2004
I ran a standalone blog — mostly the usual ramblings — that was surprisingly popular, not least because there was little competition at the time. Fun to recall: while blogs already existed, mine was the first one in Russian to use “blog” in the URL.
The garden of departing visitors
2000
Keen to show business owners the cost of bad interfaces, I published a few articles about it. Here’s the earliest one I can still find.
The Vault
1999-2003
I was curious about how to transition from the goode aulde codex (i.e. paper rectangles) books to the web. I wanted to experiment so I digitised (manually, took a lot of hours of scanning and OCR) some over-the-top Soviet books. I was sure that they would be memory-holed soon by new Post-Soviet elites (and they did, as the future has shown) and wanted to protect the books as important reminders of the era.
The books were diverse, from the film-to-book children's book to the venomous fifth-column-bashing Stalinist title from 1937.
Pro tip Well-preserved early web designs are hard to find — the early Wayback Machine captures missed a lot. Here, you can. Funny thing: it was designed with a viewport of 860, as this was the best practice at the time (for desktop, no tablets existed yet).
Design for the ones who think
1999-2002
I had a site with articles on various design topics. From the previous millennium!
© Vlad Golovach, 1999-2026. ¶ Trademarks shown on this site belong to their respective owners. ¶ Set in Vollkorn & Gill Sans.
