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Our favorite PR person Chelsea from Grapevine PR recently sent us a cracker-of-an example of a brand providing transparency to demonstrate their authenticity. Ecoeggs produce genuine, certified free range eggs from some of the happiest chooks going around. And how do we know this to be true? Because we can check-out those chooks seven hours-a-day on the Ecoeggs ChookCam.
— Dave Ansett at Truly Deeply
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Is your wireless network secure and why you should care
Hands up who has surfed the web using their neighbour’s open Wi-Fi network? Hands up if you know for sure your neighbour’s are not surfing the net on your open wireless network right now. Based on an extremely low sample size, basically visible networks around our office at Front Design and our staff’s homes, we think people have been getting the message. Not so long ago we were surrounded by unlocked networks both at work and home, but no longer.
However according to a story published by SMH today, they tested a number of home networks in Sydney and found a substantial number were open and plenty without even a password.
Why should you worry about this? Consider these scenarios. Would be bothered by someone parking their caravan on your front lawn and plugging into your power points. No different. How about if some likely lads let themselves in your open front door and committed a few nasty felonies and left your address and details for the authorities to blame you? Not only are you looking at performance loss from extra users, but they could be engaged in nefarious activities which show up on your account. Knock, knock.
So protect yourself and be responsible. If you don’t have a clue where to start, just ask your friends or look at some reputable sites such as Stay Smart Online. At least make sure you change the default password to something smart, and use WAP as a minimum rather than WEP for the wireless network type. You will need to know the password for your modem/router and simply login via your browser to it’s network address (usually printed on the unit itself) to change these settings.
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So-Lite Rice Crackers Packaging Design
We drew inspiration for this recent design from the natural texture of a rice bag, with colours inspired by the product itself. And as a playful finish the window shape provides a sneak peak at the tasty product and is reminiscent of an open mouth. Their fate foretold. We completed this design for a new client last April and have just recieved an advance photo from the manufacturer in China. Really looking forward to seeing the product on shelves soon.
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South Sydney Commercial Real Estate Logo Design and Branding
South Sydney Commercial is a vibrant new venture founded by two very experienced consultants. Craig and Stella came to us with lot’s of enthusiasm, some great ideas, open minds and the skills to communicate what they wanted to achieve. As a designer, you can’t ask me more. All they lacked were the tools and skills to turn their thoughts into a fresh, practical brand that reflected their philosophy.
As a new client we firstly spent valuable time getting to know and understand their business, to understand the intended result of their initial concept and only then did we generate a successful design solution. The new logo was then applied to business cards, stationery and signage.
We really enjoyed the process and Stella and Craig were surprised by our attention to detail and helpful advice, and overjoyed by the result.
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Ecoeggs website refresh
Long standing client Free Range Egg Farms came to us with a need to refresh their existing website to support national product launch and to provide a vehicle for public involvement and to help product differentiation.
Our solution was to promote brand transparency and product authenticity through ChookCam, a live controllable webcam stream from the farms, and a new website with open discussion and information to back up claims.
The website was built on the Squarespace platform as it enabled rapid prototyping and a robust and flexible framework ideally suited to our needs.
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That’s a good rule of thumb for designing and writing page titles: pick a name (and, for CMS templates, a pattern) that makes sense as the name of a bookmark for that page. Most bookmarking tools — the ones built into web browsers, and bookmarklets for third-party apps — do use the page title as the default bookmark name. Tools that help people tweet links to articles use the page title as the default description. So make titles useful. Write them for humans, not search engine spiders. Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out.
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Lacie comes to the party
A happy end to last weeks post about Lacie power supplies. I had to rebuild one of the drives after a faulty supply corrupted it, and one of the two remaining working units from last week had stopped working over the weekend, leaving us with one out of six! Then a big box arrives with five new power supplies and we did not end up having to send our old ones in for exchange.
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Front Design Flavors →
A really elegant and easy-to-use aggregator for your digital life. I really like the way they have set it up to encourage a more personal approach to styling rather than providing set themes.
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Lacie power supplies, two out of six ain’t good.
A tech colleague of ours had once cited power supply reliability as the main reason he would not install Lacie external boxes with any of his clients. I filed it away thinking, sure, but they look cool! And bought lots. A power supply just karked it yesterday and I thought, no worries I’ll just use one from one of the other drives laying around. More difficult than I thought… out of six power supplies only two were working. I was all prepared to just buy some more, c’est la vie, but luckily not everbody in the office is as complacent as me and Ken put in the “I’m not happy” call.
