We decided to add an easter egg to the Kyan website, so I illustrated the Kyan secret lab, starring professor Wake. He performs experiments in the secret lab underground here at Kyan towers. Note: The character is not based on Steven Wake (developer).
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After months of tooing and froing we have finally released the Kyan website into the big old World Wide Web, It had just been sitting on our development servers for far too long and was like a caged wild animal, desparate to get out. It’s got a really nice illustrative feel, which I’m very happy about. I love the paper airplane illustration and everyone has started throwing them around the office to stay ‘on brand’.
I think the new look really represents Kyan in the perfect light and is bang on! At first, I wasn’t too sure about the strapline ‘We are a creative web design & development agency with a penchant for web standards’, but it’s growing on me. Me and Pete Orme wanted to use ‘A jazzamatastic fusion of creatology and techtivity’ but we thought that it wasnt great for SEO reasons, which is a shame.
There is an easter egg in the new site design but more to come on that…
Please vote for me. Give me the love.
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Bev, who informed me of the cloned website, said “You should be flattered, that somebody wanted to copy your design”. I was thinking about this and I guess I am a little flattered and not really that angry about it. The problem arises when somebody else spots the copied design and points out that the original site that you designed is in-fact the copy!! This happened to me a few months ago when I noticed that a company in Guildford (who have since taken down the site) had ripped off one of my designs www.charcol.co.uk. An old work colleague thought that the coincidence that the company that copied my design was based in Guildford which is very close to where I live now and I was half accused as being the perpetrator. This made me more angry than anything, So I rang them and had a good rant. They took the site down the next day and even phoned up my old company to apologise.
I don’t know how these people sleep at night knowing that they have ripped off designs like this. I mean I feel bad even if my designs hint at other designs or are too similar to something else.
There is a great tool for checking that your website hasn’t been ripped off. Visit www.copyscape.com and type your URL in and it’ll check if other sites on the web have similar text to yours.
]]>However if brand identity fails to appear, I just start to make one. I find it makes the design process so much easier.
The way I approach this is to ask questions in the form of a ‘Discovering the Brand Identity’ document. this consists of:
Once you have the answers to all these questions you have a great reference and starting point to start the design process.
]]>The EE admin seems slick and well designed on first impressions. I’m still finding my way around, so not much to report yet. I’m using the default template while I’m figuring out how to load in a new one and integrate my own template eventually.
Word Press never really did it for me, It just seemed a bit ‘hacky’ to do the things you wanted to do. What I find nice about EE so far is that it feels more like a proper CMS rather than just a blog tool. Hopefully it’ll be a lot more flexible than Word Press.
Text Pattern on the other hand is very flexible, but I found the admin panel very painful to use and really badly designed. As I use EE I will write about the features and tools which I like and don’t like and we’ll go from there.
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