Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Daveed, a sci-fi fan and developer (in that order), was excited relive some classic Star Trek episodes in a Google Doodle. In this interactive tribute to the original series, which premiered 46 years ago, Capt. Kirk (or in this case the letter “O”) is beamed down to a planet, fights a reptilian Gorn, and defeats…
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5 Digital Marketing Takeaways from WordCamp Montreal 2012
We’re really fortunate to be able to share and learn from our peers about the WordPress platform’s latest developments and techniques. We recently attended WordCamp Montreal, one of the many local “un-conferences” on everything to do with WordPress. At a WordCamp, advice typically ranges from beginner information to highly technical and specific aspects of the popular website content management system. It’s also a great place to meet people involved in Web development, design and content. In this blog post, we review five of the interesting…
Around the Office: Ecce Homo Memes, Mapping the Internet’s Changes Over a Decade, and Social Engagement Driving Search Rankings
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. As an online media specialist, Daveed likes to think that he’s made some impact on the growth of the online world. In just 10 years, the percentage of the world’s population that’s online jumped from 9.1 per cent to 33 per cent; and daily time spent on the Internet went from 46 minutes to 4…
Around the Office: Suspicious Facebook Holdouts, Walkman’s Social Sharing Runaround, and the Trouble with Tablet Magazines
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Daveed remembers a time when only a small number of people were willing to open their personal information up to the online world. Now it seems that not having a Facebook account is a red flag that could associate you to antisocial behaviour, or worse. And while it seems reasonable to allow people the freedom…
Around the Office: Styling with Iconbench, Community Building with Brickstarter, and Creating Mobile-Friendly Email Newsletters
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Always on the lookout for ways to improve design, Eva discovered Iconbench, an online platform that lets you style, select and download icons for use on your website, application or project. This way you can get the perfect styled icons with just the right drop shadow, gradient, and too many other parameters to mention. Pull…
Around the Office: Steve Jobs’ Humility, Olympic Typography, Optical Illusions, and more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. “The logo and typographic branding of the modern Olympics have been striking, sometimes iconic, and always a representation of the design ethic of the time,” says Monotype Imaging’s Allan Haley. Haley wrote a fascinating blog post about Olympic typography and logo changes from the first image and type logo of the 1952 Helsinki games to…
Bad Design Sometimes Hits the Mark, But That’s No Excuse
Sometimes bad design can be good. Ahem, sorry, let’s try this again: Bad design can meet the client’s objectives. But even though bad design sometimes hits the mark, we think there’s no excuse for bad design. And furthermore, you can incorporate whatever trickery that make horrible designs work into something that’s truly elegant and beautiful. We were thinking about this lately after reading a lively Reddit thread in which a designer complained that his nightclub poster was rejected because it…
Around the Office: A Remote Orchestra, Getting Closer with Zoomy, Wes Bos Talks WordPress, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Eva was in the lab – Google’s Web Labs that is – making music by controlling a virtual orchestra. Google’s Universal Orchestra, which allows people to control instruments online, is part of an exhibition at the Science Museum in London made to show the extraordinary workings of the internet and inspire a new generation of…
Around the Office: Gold-Medal Sites, Learning by Osmosis, Undersea Web Design, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. With only two weeks left until the London 2012 Olympics, we were reminded that athletes can benefit from having a great website. We think the sites for Miami Heat co-captain LeBron James and snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler are great examples of how to keep fans updated on the latest news, share photos and show your personality. Some of these athlete…
Around the Office: Logos Take Shape, Google Maps More Interiors, and Digital Media Makes For Empty Shelves
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. We’ve been hard at work creating logo concepts for Toronto WordCamp 2012. Scott, one of our developers, created a – let’s say – experimental WordCamp logo. Keep in mind that he’s a developer and not a designer. If anything, we hope that this logo demonstrates to other developers how difficult the job of logo design…