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?

Now that we have ushered in 2007, we cannot help but look back on 2006 and recollect the things that we have achieved in the past year.

The O-Six has been a very fruitful year for us. Not only have we launched a new website, but we have managed to roll it out with XHTML and CSS compliance, sprinkled with AJAX and a company blog to boot. The sweet victory from this was the recognition we received from various design awards and websites. To say we are grateful and overwhelmed would be an understatement.

Apart from the website and the mini buzz it had generated for us, we have also had the good opportunity to work with various new clients, such as Toshiba (Singapore), Marketing Institute of Singapore and National Youth Council, and many others, on their new web projects. The whole experience we took away from the collaborations opened our eyes to how different teams work and function, how each client’s requirements get translated to what their target audience are seeking and how closely working together between us and the clients helps create value from our web services to features that really matter.

On the home ground, we have been expanding ourselves on multiple fronts, and will continue to do so in 2007. The future is bright and we cannot wait to get kicking into gear again!

This year, Time has picked the collective us as the Person of the Year. It is not the first time that Time has selected a group instead of a person for the title and this year, they have decided to honour the explosive phenomena of the blogosphere, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and the whole slew of Web 2.0 community sites.

This year has proved to be an exciting year for online social networking and people are starting to take notice and feel the impact of involvement by netizens in the forms of content contribution, citizen journalism and personal publishing and broadcasting, to name but a few.

The article features a number of personalities who have made use of such platforms as community sites, blogs, and websites to share information and commentary on their lives and the people and happenings around them. We are particularly touched by the stories of Ali Kurshid (young photographer in Karachi, Pakistan who shares his photos on Flickr), Lee Kelly (mil-blogger who writes from the front lines), Waz and Lenny (British couple who host an alternative kind of cooking show) and Harriet Klausner (the quinquagenarian speed reader who has written over 12,000 book reviews on Amazon). Each is a living and inspring story of how the Internet is changing the way we live, communicate, share and most importantly, bond and spread love for one another.

“We want MIS website to look young, vibrant and refreshing, but we don’t want the cliche of using pictures of students on the website”.

That was one of the main brief we got from MIS and the result is this:-

The Winners of The 2006 W3 Awards have been announced and we are delighted to know that we have won a Silver award for this website under the categories of Corporate Communications and Homepage Design. We are extremely delighted to find our quality of work being appreciated and acknowledged by relevant design bodies like W3 Awards…

The launch of this current website has done great things for us. We see ourselves being listed by sites like Netdiver, CSS Remix, Unmatched Style and many others. Our search engine ranking and listing improved termendously and the volume of online enquiries have increased, not only from Singapore but from overseas customers as well.

This post has nothing to do with design and development, but we are just trying to spread the word for a good cause against online child pornography. Help to light a candle for the innocent victims of online child abuse.

Crimes against children are what we feel are the worst forms of crimes. According to the website, victims of online child pornography are getting younger, and the abuses are getting worse. The average age is nine years old. If you are angry like us, head over there and show your support. Let’s wish for a better world today for our hopes of tomorrow — our children.

- Unshamed -

The owner has explained himself in his comment and has gracefully removed the site for now. We applaud him for his willingness to admit his mistake and rectify the wrong. We look forward to his new site.

The merit of semantic markup and web standards for websites cannot be over-emphasized. While it is fairly obvious why this can vastly benefit website design, few realise that web applications can gain the most out of this potent mix.

For starters, the separation of content and presentation means that developers and designers can play well together. When the developers take effort to output XHTML code in a semantic way, giving meaning to the page content, the designers can easily take this away and apply presentation styles to format and control how each part of the pages get rendered. Gone are the days when table or list formatting need to be hard-coded or couple tightly to the application code. By strictly producing content in terms of what they signify (Is that a data table? Or is that best perceived as a list?), developers can defer presentation decisions until the designers can work on them. This also opens up possibilities for content on the page to be reused in a multitude of ways.

Another cool benefit is that different stylesheets can be developed to control how the application screens can be rendered on different media, such as on-screen or on paper. Much like the argument for websites, data and content displayed on these screens can be easily transformed or omitted depending on what’s needed on screen (such as fancy graphics and colours to demarcate areas) and the bare essentials for output destined for printing on black-and-white printers. Not to mention if access by mobile devices are also on the plate, but you get the picture.

In fact, we have been doing this for a while for our own web applications, and this has smoothen our development process where the application screens can be easily skinned to a new look or to blend with existing branding. You can get the screens rendered to a format suitable for print without too much effort (contrast with the traditional way of coding up additional “printer-friendly” scripts). All in all, this method of developing web applications has made it flexible for developers and designers to focus on what they do best and allow for clear separation of tasks. For the target users, what they benefit most is better experience that comes with smaller downloads (verbose presentation rules are left out of the content codes) and better looking screens. What’s not to love about this?

Two more new copycats found running in the wild. Thanks to our visitors for letting us know.

Copycat No 1: Site taken down as the owner gracefully explained his situation to us. All the best Dan.

This one is the ultimate, Copycat No 2: Taken down but we are getting very tired of hearing the same old “I’m just trying out the CSS…” or “I’m learning how to build tabless website” story.

Seriously, if you bother to change the graphic and text, I’m sure you can put in some effort to change the look and feel of it. Or put a big text that says “Training Session - rightful owner, thepixelage” and don’t put them under your actual domain name!

Have you ever imagine how it is going to look like if our prospective client where to stumble upon your website first? We will end up being accused of stealing someone else’s design.

This is not a joking matter. Do keep in mind that this website is a business website, not a personal website. So if you want to learn CSS or learn how to build a website, take some effort to at least make it look like you are doing that.