A new year and a new chapter will be written in our book or I should say blog. This year, the first entry will be on us moving to our new office at the end of February. If everything goes well, we should start operating in our new location on the 1st March 2008.

Our new office will be located at Cendex Centre, 120 Lower Delta Road. More information will be provided later. We will also be posting some photos of our new office, so for those of you who are interested, stay tuned!

A Brief Message by designers for designers.

In this time and era when information overload is ubiquitous and gunning for Inbox Zero seems to be more like a fantasy, it’s refreshing to see A Brief Message which, in their own words, “features design opinions expressed in short form—200 words or less”. It publishes short articles from individuals who are involved in design in one way or more. What I like about it is that these articles are thought-provoking and they invite you to think about how design affects you and your life. Not to mention the design of the site is also very well-done (got to love the layout and the use of typography). While you can easily subscribe to the RSS feed, I would encourage you to check out the site itself because the articles are accompanied by really nice illustrations that you will find well worth the effort to load up the site outside your RSS reader!

What is Scribd?

Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. There are all sorts of other features that make it easy and fun to publish, convert, embed, analyze, and read documents.Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read.

With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.

Now, what more can we do on the web? Think… start thinking…

I have Google Earth on my desktop and now I’m going to start flying with my flight simulator. Check out TechCrunch for more info.

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We’ve always known that Google has wanted to challenge Microsoft’s desktop dominance in a number of areas, but to date we didn’t know that extended to gaming.

Hidden inside Google Earth is a secret Flight Simulator that takes full advantage of Google’s extensive satellite imagery.
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I’ve always enjoy reading plasticbag.org and one of the post was on OpenID. As quoted from his blog.

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OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you’re on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you’re bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That’s all there is to it.
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What strike me is that the Singapore government started one sign in function for all of their government portal long before this OpenID concept came about. Something simple yet no one really start to think about it in bigger scale until OpenID.

Check out plasticbag.org for more.

We all know that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 but for most (or nearly all) web designers and developers like us, rushing to upgrade to IE 7 can be quite a problem. Their inability to run IE 6 and 7 concurrently would make it difficult for designers and developers to check their work and make sure everything runs smoothly on both IE 6 and 7. But with more and more public users starting to upgrade to IE 7, we do not have much of a choice but to find a solution which will allow us to upgrade to IE 7 and still be able to run IE 6. One solution is to install IE 7 on one test machine but if you are a web designer, you will know how painful that can be!

tredosoft.com found a nice way of running IE 7, 6, 5.5, 5, 4 and 3 together. Yes! You read that right! So to all web designers and developers out there, what are you waiting for?

NOTE: Use this software at your own risk. We are not the developer of this software, so all credit should go to tredosoft.com

For Windows Vista users, sorry… this software will not work on VISTA.

One thing that we have always fail to do is to showcase our clients website before and after the redesign work. We start with Marketing Institute of Singapore:-

Marketing Institute of Singapore

Before

After

Toshiba Singapore Pte Ltd

Before

After

Both Ron and I were recently featured in The Singapore Marketer, a quarterly publication of Marketing Institute of Singapore. In the article, we are labelled as “young enterpreuners who have proven ourselves to be successful in our business venture”. We are very flattered to be given the opportunity to be interviewed and to be called successful is indeed a glowing compliment that we do not think we are totally deserving, given that we have been in business for a pretty short four years. However, to be recognised for our efforts and be able to share a little with our counterparts on what works for us, we really wish to thank Marketing Institute of Singapore for the kind opportunity.

The road forward, we see more challenges and opportunities awaiting us. And we are excited by these and look forward to expanding our business the way we have never thought possible.

If you guys want to read the article, please click on the image below to download the PDF version of the article.

A few months back, after releasing this current website, we received an email from Sandu, the publisher of the Almanac of Asia-Pacific Design who invited us to submit some of our works to be featured in their upcoming second volume of the publication. We have just got an email from Sandu a few weeks back to inform us that our works have been chosen and as a selected contributor, we would be getting a free set of the publication. How cool is that! We are extremely impressed by the quality of the publication and the featured works by our counterpart, and feel very proud indeed to be part of this great group of designers and agencies. Thank you Sandu!

While surfing our own website today, I realise something that is kind of obvious — we don’t have a home button! I think to myself, “why do people want to put a home link on their website?” It seems to be a requirement that you must have a home button, to the extent that in some cases, we see a home button even on the homepage itself!

Don’t we all know that to go back to the homepage, we should click on the logo? This has been a practice for quite a while. To me, it feels more logical to click on the company logo to go to the homepage; afterall, the logo is like a beacon to the home base of a company?