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Prepare for WordCamp Toronto with Our Guide

Planning on coming to WordCamp Toronto? A great attitude and a willingness to learn will go a long way. But there are also some other things to bring that will make your time more enjoyable. To find out how to be prepared by reading our guest blog post on the WordCamp Toronto website.
WordCamp Toronto Ticket Giveaway from Kobayashi Online

We’re giving away five tickets to WordCamp Toronto, the city’s annual “unconference” on everything to do with the WordPress platform. Enter the contest here: http://ow.ly/dGMiA. For those of you who don’t know, WordCamp is a relaxed event where people of all levels can learn about how to create great online experiences – even if you’re new to WordPress. We like it so much, we’re silver sponsors and will be volunteering our time answering WordPress questions at the Happiness Bar. Just like us on Facebook, and enter our draw for your chance to win. The contest ends Monday, September 24, 2012…
Around the Office: Designing for Retina Displays, Star Trek Doodles, and Blogging Tips

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 him by building a primitive gun. This Doodle is lots of fun, and a reminder of Star Trek’s inspiring vision…
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 and useful things we heard at WordCamp Montreal on digital marketing. 1. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy…
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 hours. These are just some statistics that show how the Internet has come of age over the past decade, all…
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 not to post status updates for all the world to see, some people can’t help but wonder what these tech…
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 up a seat and pick the right icons at Iconbench. David’s a fan of community involvement – and not just…
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 the custom (and contentious) typeface “2012 Headline” that was created for the London 2012 games. With each, the common goal…
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 didn’t look like a typical – presumably garish – nightclub poster. The discussion around this example turned towards a problem…
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 computer scientists and enthusiasts. While you have to wait to control the robotic instruments on display, you can play with…
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 sites belong on a podium. There’s an old joke about a student who had a book strapped to his head.…
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 is. Our graphic designer, Eva, has seen logos take shape in front of her eyes, but she was happy to…