It’s time to say good bye to Oakleigh. Goodbye to the delicious souvlakis from Orexi. Goodbye to the Cranbourne / Pakenham line and goodbye to the groups of old Greek men, swinging their ‘worry beads’ and debating over coffee at 8:45 in the morning.

Yes, the time has come. We’ve out grown our humble Oakleigh office and it’s time to move on to greener pastures. Today is our final day at 55 Queens Avenue and over the weekend we will be uprooting and moving to the heart of Melbourne’s creative hub – Richmond. More specifically 96 Chestnut Street.

It’s safe to say that we’re undergoing a period of significant growth and now is the time for Koodoz to be where the action is! However the new address (and phone number: 03 9421 2291) will be the only change. Our aim still is, and always will be, to deliver high quality, innovative designs and develop amazing websites for our clients.

See you in Richmond!

P.S: Thank you to Chris Zissiadis, Mark Broadhead and Andrew J. Cosgriff for the excellent images of Richmond.

Oh Internet Explorer, how you hate us so….

Even when we’re trying to do something good you create another headache. We did a post about the great @font-face property back in May having an issue with Firefox and we thought we were clear of the woods with IE, but of course, it’s never that simple…

Thanks to this fantastic article by Michael Strand at AllCreatives.net, we found the most comprehensive solution to this problem, and also to Tweek on Flickr for the awesome picture of the fridge magnets.

Keeping web design tidy

When we implemented @font-face for the Koodoz site we were really pleased with the results, we managed to drop the aging sIFR image replacement technique and therefore dramatically reduce the amount of flash elements being loaded on our site and in turn drop a whole bunch of server requests, as well as slimming our site down by a few precious kilobytes. Nice and (as they say in Cardiff) tidy!

Knit picking with aesthetics always pays off in the end

What we didn’t notice straight away was that Internet Explorer has a problem with rendering the new fonts. While developing the Cardigan Store e-Commerce website for one of our recent Melbourne based clients, Knit Picker, we implemented @font-face early to incorporate the stylish and contemporary headings from our original website designs. It looked great in Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome, but soon enough it was time for some good old fashioned, character building IE bugs, and we noticed that our lovely elegant fonts now looked incredibly jagged, broken and well… crap. Take a look:

So after a little research we found that the problem lies with an Internet Explorer feature called ClearType, which is ironically put there to make fonts appear clearer to read on Windows systems. The issue with this is that IE is therefore trying to render our nice looking headings in a way that strips it of all its nice aliasing and smooth edges — not great look for our website design. This actually does some good for body text on Windows machines but it’s completely counter-productive for headings and places where we want our font to display as-is.

The fix

Luckily there is a solution! It lies with IE’s filter properties, which, when applied to an element will disable ClearType. However, we can’t just apply any old filter, IE8 actually needs a filter that works with the text in order to do this. Here’s an example:

h1 {
	font-family: 'Nice-Embedded-Font', Arial, Sans-Serif;
	filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.
AlphaImageLoader(src=hIEfix.png,sizingMethod=crop);
    	zoom: 1;
}

The second property, zoom: 1; isn’t needed for IE8, but must be used for IE7 because of its hasLayout feature. What this basically means is that IE7 won’t apply a filter which is not flagged as having ‘layout’ applied to it. So by adding this property we can force IE7 to do so, and in turn recognise our filter property.

Smooth. Real smooth

The result isn’t 100% perfect, but then again, nothing ever is with IE. Lets take another look at the Cardigan Store headings:

Ahhh, that’s much better. As you can see the difference isn’t drastic, but the fonts are a little smoother and less rigged, especially on the ‘Account Login’ title, which is far closer the original website design and much more closely knitted (excuse the pun) into the overall branding of the company and website.

After 10 years of courting, the time had come for our good friends Caroline and Tyrone to tie the knot.

To help the gorgeous couple inform their family and friends of their momentous day, Koodoz Design helped create a unique five-panel invitation which, as unfolded, revealed a beautiful typographic design to tell the story of their wedding day.

Opting for a classic look, the design incorporated a chic palette of black & white amongst an ornate floral motif on luxurious White Knight card. The intricate design also included a perforated, postage-paid RSVP, allowing the invitee to separate it from the invite and return via mail. The invite was sent out in a black envelope with a vibrant orange inner lining and finished with a black wax seal.

Cardigan is a boutique online store that specialises and deals only in the versatile, unisexual and ever popular range of wool knitted, cotton and acrylic fashion must-haves.

Commissioned to create a brand identity that could mix with other world-renowned high street retailers — Knit Picker required a simple and sophisticated logo that would position Cardigan as a merchant of high quality clothing in the online fashion world and eventually be recognised as a 'house-hold' name for all things cardigan.

There’s no excuse for the tardiness between blog posts, I know, but just like last time, we’ve been flat out with a couple of decent size projects and have managed to do our brilliant best to ignore this corner of our website. Yet, it hasn’t been all work and no play, as we’ve had some freakin’ great music to accompany the workflow along the way.

Below is a breakdown of some of the sweet beats (all of which are massive contenders for our 2010 Top 10 list!) that have been channeling through the office speakers over the last couple of months…

Foals – Total Life Forever

It’s a shame we’ve been so busy, ’cause I really, really wanted to tell the world about this little water themed gem since its internet release.

Having been a fan of their previous album, Antitdotes after discovering them on Hype Machine’s 2008 Zeitgeist, I was super antsy to get my mitts on their new album.

Upon my first listen, I was taken aback. Shocked. Disheartened. What happened to the racey, distorted, post-punkyness I had come to expect? None of their trademark sound was to be found. Yannis barely even raises his voice!! It appears the boys from Oxford had grown up in between LPs and given a bit of a helping hand on the production, at the same time.

In all honesty, Total Life Forever took me a couple of ‘background ‘listens’ before I could fully appreciate the new and glorious qualities that it had to offer. But now that I’ve had the opportunity to fully envelop myself in their new sound. And I’m really, really glad they took the big step forward.

Here is the video from their first single, This Orient

LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening

Where does one begin with a review of LCD Soundsystem?? These New Yorkers are definitely in a league of their own. Left of centre? Outside the box? However you wanna label them, they sure know how to make some unique tunes.

It turns out, since making this album, LCD have gone their separate ways (which is a real shame) but it hasn’t stopped them from making a cracker of an album and going out in style! Stand out tracks include Dance Yrself Clean (you gotta love the quirky 3+ minute build up of the intro which explodes into some very chunky synthesized goodness). All I Want, You Wanted a Hit – which I presume is an ‘open letter’ to wanky record label execs and Pow Pow, with tongue-in-cheek lyrics that you can’t help but smile at:

On this occasion, there are a couple of things that we know that we learned from fact magazine
One, the king wears a king hat and lives in a king house
Two, your time will come, but tonight is our night, so you should give us all of your drugs
Three, we have a black president and you do not, so shut up,
because you don’t know shit about where I’m from that you didn’t get from your TV

The music video for Drunk Girls, sums up the band’s style, perfectly!

The Chemical Brothers – Further

Ahh, the brothers of chemicals. How good are these guys?!? Studio album number 7 and there doesn’t seem to be any signs of slowing down for the kings of dance culture.

When I first heard the debut single, Escape Velocity, on Triple J, I was a little unsure about the overall style. It all seemed a little dated and ’90s house-esque’ and I thought the old school beats were a bit of a step backwards for the ‘Dust Brothers’. But after giving the album, Further, a more in-depth listen, it quickly became clear that this was a very deliberate and appropriate direction for the The Chemical Brothers to take. In fact, the first single is now one of my favourite tracks (with it’s similar sound and possible homage to The Who’s Baba O’Riley) and I’m certain this would go off in a rave tent with their infamous light shows and the odd mind-altering enhancer! Also doubles as a perfect album for exercising.

The video for Another World features some impressive light/sound visuals.

Freelance Whales – Weathervanes

Now for a more rootsy/folky album. I stumbled across Freelance Whales (odd name, I know) via Pretty Much Amazing aka PMA – my new favourite music blog and was immediately hooked after watching the acoustic recording of Generator 1st Floor (see below).

Of late, I’ve really been a sucker for Banjos and folky music and Freelance Whales are no exception. I think with the absence (or rather, hiatus) of The Arcade Fire, these guys seemed like the perfect substitute until that album drops.

For anyone else who enjoys a quintet (or more) of artistic musos, I suggest you give Weathervanes a listen. It’s definitely worth having in your collection!

Live/Acoustic performance of Generator 1st Floor.

To coincide with the launch of the AJM Financial Planning website, we assisted them in the creation of a 6-page DL brochure to cross-promote the Personal Insurance and Small Business Insurance services that they offer. Focusing on their local area, the printed collateral was distributed to both domestic and commercial residences for maximum exposure.

Maintaining the visual aesthetics of the website, the brochure promotes AJM Financial Planning through consistent branding, clean typography and white space, the use of positive family and small business owner imagery and a clear and concise message about the personalised services that AJM provides. In turn, offering a bright and visually attractive marketing piece that is easy on the eye with information that is simple to digest.

Approached by Charter Mercantile Agency to develop a fresh and exciting new brand for their existing eDebt Collection company - an online service for SMEs to regain overdue payments from their debtors. Koodoz Design wanted to produce a logo which was modern with a hint '2.0', that offered the same ideals as their 'Simple, No Fuss...' motto.

Minimal and straightforward, the redesign of the eDebt Collection logo (see existing logo here) projects an air of confidence and a ‘go-gettem’ attitude. Incorporating a rounded, heavyset typeface, the company evokes a sense of strength and stability, in tandem, projecting calmness and composure with its cool colour palette. Overall, creating a logo which produces a pro-active and positive emotion towards debt collection. The leaning angle of type also suggests a forward thinking business, whilst the stylised, green ‘e & arrow’ mark, represents the collection of money to/for the creditor.

On the social…

Love it, hate it or have no clue about it, Social Media is well and truly got its claws into the backbone of the internet. Buzz words like Web 2.0 and Social Networking are now common speak for internet folk, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter are as much as household names as Hoover and Kleenex.

And it seems as though it’s here to stay. Even the naysayers, who at one time suggested that these social sites were just a fad, would have to admit that social media is still going strong and is even on the increase.

Socialholicism

Just looking at a few figures, it’s easy to understand why social media and its integration into website development is as important now to web designers as closing HTML tags. Lets take a look:

Facebook, the worlds largest social networking site has over 9 million users in Australia alone (source: Facebook Dec 2009), that’s not far from being half the population of the country. It’s even more mind-blowing when you look at the global user base of over 400 million active users as of June 2010, Crikey! Even my Dad is on Facebook!

Twitter has over 105 million users, with 1.6 million in Australia (source: Twitter April 2010). So it’s not just Facebook that’s pulling in the big numbers.

Considering 72.9% of Australian adults are active internet users (Universal McCann) and 3 out of 4 of them are members of social networking sites (Forrester Research) it’s easy to see why, according to Social Media News, Australia has one of the highest uptakes of social media in the world.

More popular than email

You may find it surprising that social networks and blogs are now more popular than email (Nielsen), but thinking about it, I can’t remember the last time I used email to get in touch with a friend, I always use Facebook.

And just take a look at how social media has been incorporated into the mainstream. Most days on the train, I (rather shamefully) have a quick browse of the celebrity gossip section of MX, which features a round of of the most interesting celebrity Twitter posts.

News broadcasts incorporate Tweets, posts on their website and information shared on Facebook into their stories to capture the public’s opinion and response to the big issues, and controversial blogs, tweets and comments are consistently making news stories. Need I mention, ahem, Perez Hilton’s blog (Hmm in that case social media wasn’t such a good idea).

You can also take note of the way in which social networkers are ’socialising’, it’s not just on the good old fashioned PC. I can’t tell you how many times a day I see someone checking their Facebook, MySpace or Twitter profile on their iPhone or Blackberry on the train, or how many ad’s I see with specialised ‘Social Networking’ phone and mobile broadband plans.

A web designers prerogative

So what does this mean for web designers? You might find it surprising that some folk in the web design world are among the most skeptical and unforgiving of sites like Facebook. When I’ve talked to other web designers some seem a little reluctant to fully embrace social media themselves, whereas some are fully integrated web socialites. And on the whole, most of us are a right old bunch of bloggers.

However, considering all the above, I think there is one thing that all web designers can agree on; Social Media is big business, and you’d be a fool not to take it seriously and include it in your services.

Social media marketing is now being taken very seriously by the big companies. McDonalds, RaboBank, Telstra and CocaCola (to name a few) all have “Social Media Strategies”. Companies are even employing “Social Media Strategists“, a position that didn’t exist 5 years ago (probably even less).

This means that more and more clients are noticing Social Media and how it can really effect their marketing. If some smaller business are a little slower at jumping on the band wagon, it’s becoming necessary to inform them of it’s importance and how you can harness social media to their advantage.

So as web designers and web design companies, I think we can all safely say how pressing it is to ‘do social media’, and more importantly, that we know how to do it the right way, and the most effective way for a business to benefit from it. But perhaps that’s an issue for another post …

Anyway, I think we should all switch to FriendFace.

Australian Teachers Chronicle carried out a major overhaul to their teachers diary and planning software, upgrading to a web based "cloud" application to increase their number of users on both Windows and Mac based platforms and dramatically expand their position in the market.

To coincide with this release, we designed a 6pp DL Brochure. The design incorporates a clean and modern layout, with the focus on clever typography and copywriting to provide a large amount of vital information, which is both easy to digest and promotes the features of the application. The array of striking green circles and black curved borders adds a sleek 'tech-savvy' look and feel, whilst maintaining continuity with the branding which we also developed.

Tom Remfry is a unique horticuluralist with a passion for aesthetics and sound ecological principles, so when he approached us to design a logo and a 2pp DL Flyer, we wanted to really project these principles and showcase what he can do.

To achieve this we used high quality, vibrant images and stylish typography photographed by Joe Vittorio, with much of the focus on close-up shots of lush greenery and garden features carefully captured to showcase the standard of his work. The front of the promotional flyer features a dreamy image of feathered flora, with the logo subtly placed in the top right corner, creating a professional and contemporary feel that places Tom's Secret Garden a cut above his competitors.