Hello.

My name is Misha Berezin, I am nineteen years old. I live in Moscow, the city of nazbols and meatballs. I am keen on espresso and long strolls through the city.

I hope you enjoy reviewing my portfolio.

Russo–Turkish Wars: the chartIt was early summer, 2011. I was graduating from my high school and one of the exams to take was Russian History. The day prior to the test you could have seen me scanning through miles of notes and gigabytes of information.

At a moment I realised, that some of the most ob-scure episodes for me were the Russo-Turkish Wars – a three-centuries-long series of conflicts involving Russian and Ottoman Empires. I launched Dream-weaver and spent hours making up a nice HTML/CSS chart, compiling my notes.

Like any history student I had hard time memorizing year sone or another war began or ended. In my chart each russian military campaign is sharp-ly separated from another other and the dates of the main events are visually emphasized. Colour coding makes it clear, whether a battle or a treaty was a success for Russian Empire.

The page layout is grid-based.

“With your tear-stained eyes You see clearly things that were so nice”

The most challenging part was about Crimean War – probably the most famous and complex Russo-Turk-ish conflict. This time I not only had to mention war declarations, major battles and peace treaties – the reasons for and the consequences of the conflict, its phases, fronts and heroes were important as well. The layout bore the burden of the new information honourably. Hurrah!

See the chart at misha.mymotherland.ru/turkishwars

On-screen graphics for Dozhd “I am alone, Throwing stones to the dark”

July’11 was quite a bore. I stayed at home for most time of the day drinking coke and watching television. I had never liked the on-screen graphics at Dozhd, an inde-pendent russian news channel – watching it all day long just made the thing insuf-ferable enough for me to take action.

Primarily, it was about information density. The layout Dozhd had in 2011 and still has in 2013 uses the space of the screen inefficiently – about one third of pixels dis-plays tonns of irrelevant, rarely changing and poorly set up text information instead of video. Look at the picture on the left or visit tvrain.ru to see the way on-screen graphics should not be.

‘Antananarivo’ fits well. And if it is something like ‘Moscow’, you may even enter a date.

There is enough room for a lengthy heading and an even lengthier lead.

I’ve made neat layouts for skype and telephone transmissions, and on-line chats between the studio and a reporter.

However important the changes are, you can still tell which channel it is the very moment you turn on the TV. The pink, the three slashes, the bent corners – all trademark graphical elements are here.

I sent a bunch of JPEGs to the channel’s email, but never received an answer.

Website layouts for MotherlandA couple of my friends own a little media: a Vkontakte page called Motherland. They blog about russian indie music: sometimes it is they who find some new interesting tunes, often music is sent to them by young artists.

Motherland has about 20,000 subscribers. This winter they decided to move further and to launch a website.

I’ve designed a flexible masonry layout for the main page.

When you come to the main page of a news web-site or a blog, you are eager to see what’s new. That’s why you need the disctinction between visited links and links yet to be visited.

“I would have almost died For this beauty”

There are several types of link blocks a webmaster can easily switch between by just changing CSS class of one.

The article layout is a fixed-width one.

Nowadays internet media tend to make pages complex in both looks and interaction principles. I find it wrong: reading a web page must not be harder than reading a magazine.

My principle for designing a text/image page for web can be called The Up–Down Principle: no horizontal scrolling, no AJAX image galleries with tiny previews, no position-fixed elements, no more read-mores. You scroll, you read, you might click a link, a banner, or a video.

The website has not been launched yet. You may see my design templates at misha.mymotherland.ru/ motherland

Posters and tickets for Motherland Summer festivalThis year Motherland threw an all-summer-long music festival – every two weeks, from June, 22 to August, 31 a bunch of russian indie artists played an open-air concert at Flacon.

It had its ups and downs but, not doubt, it turned to be a great adventure. And a big professional challenge, as for me: I designed posters and tickets for the festival.

The poster for June, 22 at Res-publica store. July, 20 was The Day of

Long Band Names. My layout did well.

July, 5 the festival was quite a hit.

August, 3 was a DJ party.

Poster for August, 17, signed by Motorama. The apple garden photo is by my friend Julia.

The last gig was quite a disaster.

Read more about the festival at http://vk.com/motherlandsummer

“Back, to the start of the way It doesn’t seem so unusual”