How could one come by four Svetlanas and a bottle of rum? Would you have to be a rich Russian oligarch, or a naughty salary man? Neither a tryst, nor an escape, nor a drink fueled indiscretion – yet the four Svetlanas are for real. We are not talking about a high stakes, closed door kinky Moseley moment here… No the Svetlanas I am talking about are of a different kind entirely. These Svetlanas come from a distinguished long line of Svetlanas that came before them – they have been in existence since 1928 – but don’t look a day older…

We are talking about the great JSC Svetlana valves – in particular about the 6L6GC Winged-C variety. And, there are four of them, since we need four matched ones.

Beware: The Svetlana brand name in the U.S. is owned by an entirely different company, and you will not be getting the original production at all. So if you live in the US or Canada, make sure you are asking for JSC Svetlanas. According to Watford Valves, they are the “best clean sounding current production 6L6GC made to day.”

I have put these into my good ole’ ValveKing 100, and they have brought the thing to life. When you want valves, you gotto go Russian!

Here they are in situ, purring happily away:

And… here is another wicked sample of Russian graphic art:

There are many differing schools of design out there, and in this article, I will look at the British, US, and German/Swiss schools of web design from a critical perspective. I have a fair amount of experience with each one of these varying approaches as I also have my own favourites. Without a doubt, my own preconceptions will colour this article – but then this is unavoidable – and perhaps even desirable.

Both in terms of visual and written content, the British approach tends to be the most baroque and rococo – with lavish embellishments and dressings vying to spin a yarn of exclusivity. The British approach tends to be highly conceptual, focused on spin, and geared towards mental massage.

Of course, the U.K. does not possess an indigenous and endemic web design school. What we witness in the UK is the extension of the printing craft and industry into the web medium. Consequently in the UK, the web medium carries excess print-baggage.

The origins of the desire to be exclusive could be coming from the glaring disparity between the abject and despicable poverty on the one hand, and the gluttonous exclusive royal glamour on the other. The UK is where Marx wrote Das Kapital. In Victorian UK, the extreme disparity between rich and poor probably created a desire for belonging to the ‘exclusive’ – albeit be it, for the poor, only an escape into a fantasy world. Nice ornamental designs could have served as a means for escape.

The UK approach has been successful at transplanting print designs to the web medium. This is no easy feat. The web medium is and remains in essence antithetical to print. The differences between print and web media are well documented, and constitute the ’101′ of any web design course in the US. But in the UK, if you talk about the difference between web and print, you are likely to get many injurious looks.

In recent years, with the advent of Web 2.0, UK web design has been moving towards the US approach, and it will be interesting to see how the UK web design approach will respond to accommodate its print background as well as the newer US ideas.