Month: July 2012

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…