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  • Around the Office: Louis CK Cuts Off Ticket Agents, Record Label Offers Free Samples, and the Old Office Gets Demolished

    Earlier this year, 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 that Louis CK’s upcoming standup comedy tour has avoided the price gouging which is normal when dealing…

  • 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 breakdown of how the iconic Twitter bird evolved to its present state. Roberto found out that a site that a…

  • 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 – Book Burning Party on August 5th.” Since no one wants to be a part of a town that burns…

  • Around the Office: Mister Rogers Remixed, On{X} Takes Control, and Keeping Online Profiles Safe

    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 installed Microsoft on{X} on his Android phone, which enables the phone to be programmed remotely using an in-browser JavaScript API interface. Based on the code you input, you can automate the phone to do certain actions based on where you are, what time it is, and other parameters such as the weather. For David, this means his phone will tell him, based on the forecast, whether or not to take an umbrella to work in the…

  • Around the Office: Regent College Online, Immortal Critique, and a Case for Pinterest

    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 He likes what Regent College has done with their website, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook design. This Vancouver graduate school is just one of many post-secondary institutions grounded in knowledge and implementing current technology. Not only that, but they do it with a divine sense of style! This week, Brent has, once again, been wrestling with technology’s disturbing philosophical implications. This week, it was humankind’s inevitable discovery of immortality. Check out Basic Instructions for the…

  • Around the Office: BBC’s Glow, Choosing Colours, and Travelling with Tech

    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. Public broadcaster BBC needed a javascript library to help their online interfaces, so they built one. Glow, which Daveed thinks is quite good, was also generously made available for anyone to use. Glow features some really great tools including an animated slideshow, an interactive timeline, and more. BBC is providing that an old media company can learn new tricks The human eye can perceive approximately 7 million different colours. To narrow down the choices for…

  • Around the Office: Minding Pixels, Canadian IT Awards, Technology Photographed Bit-By-Bit

    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 knew the iPhone 4’s extremely high resolution or “retina” display (which essentially crams twice as many pixels into the same space as before) would have implications for web design, and especially responsive design. CSS 3 queries are the key to updating website images for high DPI devices, and in a way that degrades gracefully for lower resolution screens. Of course, Adam Bradley’s Foresight.js plugin takes this a step further, making it easy to serve…

  • Around the Office: Font Tryouts, Facebook’s New Heights, and North Korea’s WordPress Theme

    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. Since finding out about it this week, Daveed and Eva were able to try out a plugin that lets you try out FontShop fonts right in Photoshop. Oftentimes we have to buy fonts before seeing exactly how they’ll look within a project we’re working on. Thanks to this plugin, designers can see exactly what fonts look like in Photoshop before buying the font. Scott rolls with the punches whenever Facebook changes the way developers create apps.…

  • Around the Office: Custom Twitter Backgrounds, Wordmark.it, and the Isotope jQuery Plugin

    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 designed many corporate Twitter themes, Eva knows how important Twitter backgrounds can be. Even savvy businesses that use tweets to reveal the personality behind their company may not realize the importance of Twitter backgrounds. A new Designers Hub article explains that a background helps align your Twitter account and brand, exhibit creativity, communicate your message, and more. When deciding on a website’s typography, we often rely on a drop-down menu showing a seemingly endless…

  • Probing the Hidden Depths of WordPress Themes

    One of the things we love about the WordPress content management system is its uncanny ability to adapt to an endless variety of web design needs. It can be changed and customized to look and perform radically differently depending on what’s needed. WordPress themes provide a design & layout out-of-the-box. In an effort to provide more unique designs to the masses, WordPress theme developers have brought a wide variety of free and premium themes. Themes will provide a set of design, layout and functionality elements, which help form the basis for the user experience. Installing an attractive WordPress theme can be thought of as a head…

  • Around the Office: Star Waltzing, Games that Program Themselves, Google Glasses, 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. Brent thinks that a new dance game included in a new Kinect title could be a step up for the Star Wars franchise. Kinect Star Wars uses the Xbox Kinnect’s motion sensor to let players feel fully immersed in lightsabre battle, but also compete in a dance-off where Princess Leia and others are enslaved by Jabba and forced to bust a move to top-40 songs remixed with Star Wars lyrics. Video games don’t create themselves……

  • Around the Office: Adobe CS6 Beta, AdSense Second Thoughts, 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. Our resident Adobe Photoshop artist, Eva, is excited about the new features to be included in Adobe Creative Suite 6. In addition to its new white-on-gray interface, CS6 features some clever tools such as an adaptive wide angle filter that helps fix problems with perspective and wide-angle lens distortion, and GPU-accelerated image processing. A CS6 beta is available for download, and some speculate that the full version will be released in May 2012. Roberto found…