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…
Author: Brent Kobayashi
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…
Automated Twitter Updates for WordPress: 5 Steps to Make Great Tweets with WP to Twitter
When you publish new content to your blog, don’t wait for people to just stumble on it – tell your followers on Twitter and other social media channels about it! If you don’t have a lot of time, there are some great ways to automatically send out a Tweet the instant you publish a new blog post. We’ve been using a WordPress plugin called “WP to Twitter”, which lets you customize how your tweets appear, making them more appealing, and…
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…
Around the Office: Louis CK Cuts Off Ticket Agents, Record Label Offers Free Samples, and the Old Office Gets Demolished
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. David, who often speculates on the future of digital media, is fairly certain that giving things away to let them play and create will loom large in marketing’s future. One of his favourite record labels, Labrador Records has done this with a soon-to-be-released single, providing free samples that can be used for remixes.Daveed is excited…
Around the Office: A Copycat Site, A Twitter Logo Redesign, Free Coffee, 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. Having been the creative mind behind a number of logo redesigns herself, Eva was impressed with Twitter’s logo rehash. She agrees with designer Graham Smith that the new logo is sharp and clever, and as he puts it: “Less of a hair-sprayed quiff: more of a rock hard waxed spike style.” Smith’s blog features a step-by-step…
Around the Office: Reverse Psychology Saves a Library, The Universe in a Flash App, Process Improvement, 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. We were all impressed with a campaign that saved a Troy, Michigan, library from anti-tax groups in the area who pressured citizens to vote to close it. In an effort to swing the vote, Leo Burnett Detroit started a reverse psychology campaign with yard signs that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd…