Yes, it's been a while between updates but that's because we're so busy!

The most important update though, is that we are expecting our first Kuraman baby in January next year.

Little Sparky is due on January 11, and while babies aren't very good at arriving on time, Riss will be off the air as of December 21st, 2007.

Don't worry - all of our clients have been assigned a brand new glamorous project manager with our wonderful friends at JMG Marketing who have been fully briefed on all of your campaigns.

If you haven't yet received a letter introducing your new project manager, please don't worry - it's probably still in the post.

Sometimes we do very important work - sometimes baby brain takes over and arguments about biscuits arise.

Lisa and I have been arguing about the best and worst biscuit in the Arnott's Assorted Creams range pack. Lisa bought a pack for the office and subsequently chose what I would consider is the most boring biscuit as her first choice.

As a result of it being Friday and us probably being fairly hyped up by the colourings in the biscuits, we have built a quick online poll to get a good feel for what the discerning public would choose as the best bikkie in the packet.

Head on over to Biscuits Matter! and have your say. It's important.

A feature spawns a feature, so now we have two more feathers to add to our cap.

South Coastal Women's Health Services has again been featured - this time in CSS Based and CSS Impress. Don't say we don't love our web standards...

</endfurtherpatontheback>

Oh, it's been a long time between updates! Nevertheless, when you get a chance to brag, why not?

Our latest launch, South Coastal Women's Health Services has been featured in no less than two CSS web design galleries.

CSS Mania and CSS Drive both deem our CSS and XHTML approach clean as a whistle, and the spectacular design certainly didn't go unnoticed.

</endpatontheback>

Footy tipping isn't only about following your favourite striped jumpers run around in the mud.

It's also about fabulous design!

After each round we send out a little email to all members of our footy tipping comp, updating them on the argy-bargy of the previous round's tipping.

This week our little newsletter caught the eye of Campaign Monitor, the makers of the software we use to distribute the emails, who want to feature it in their design gallery.

Just quietly, this is not the first time Kuraman has been featured. In 2005 Campaign Monitor highlighted an email invitation we distributed for the Beyond 30 project. In the words of Beyond 30: "Yay us."

All for a goat in Swaziland.

• Week Four Argy Bargy
• Week Three Derby Drama
• Week Two Wickedness
• Week One: Hello Fellow Footy Fans

"Computer game players from around the world could be racing cars or chasing crooks through the streets of Perth when a game is launched next year featuring WA.

"The game is the first title from new games industry player, Interzone, who have relocated their US-based development studio to Perth.

"Speaking at the GO 3 Electronic Entertainment Expo launch at the Perth Convention Centre today, Interzone operations manager Robert Spencer said their new title has the potential achieve more than $US1 billion turnover."

Read more at The West - 30th March, 2007

The British Library has been busily working on one of the best uses of Flash we've ever seen - creating high-resolution copies of the most amazing books in their collection and allowing you to view them with magnifying glasses.

Some of the books you can play with include one of the first atlases in Europe, the original Alice in Wonderland (even illustrated by Lewis Carrol), Sultan Bayber's beautifully calligraphic Qur'an (the pages look just like some Moroccoan temples we visited last year) and Vesalius' 16th century anatomy book (De Humani Corporis Fabrica), amongst others.

Have a look at Turning the Pages and kiss your Friday afternoon goodbye. You won't even need your white gloves.

Presenting the inaugural Kuraman Creative Footy Tipping competition!

Anyone may join - details below:

This is a fun social competition - you'll get reminder emails to help you put your tips in.

COST

To join: $33 ($1.50 a round).

PRIZE SPLIT

20% of profits go to Kuraman Creative's angry little sponsor child, Lwethu Szibandze. He's from Swaziland and is the current owner of a new set of yellow shoes. What he'd really like is a goat.

FIRST PRIZE

50% of booty and a secret Kuraman Creative prize.

SECOND PRIZE

20% of booty and a secret Kuraman Creative prize.

WOODEN SPOON

10% of booty and a secret Kuraman Creative prize.

To join, register your details here: Kuraman Creative Footy Tipping Competition at The West.

This is just beautiful, and a clever way of thinking about representation. By clicking on a little 'thumbnail' of a blue whale, you can see the life-size portion on your monitor - just magical.

Currently not too sure about the ethics of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, so this link doesn't represent support until further investigation. Nevertheless a surreal, almost tactile, way to get their point across.

See http://www.wdcs.co.uk/media/flash/whalebanner/content_pub_en.html.

Our client, the Interactive Television Research Institute, occasionally uses eye-tracking techniques in their audience research testing - the last one being on a project partnered with the Academy Awards®. They tested men and women watching the Oscars using various iTV techniques to see which was the most effective for retention of information.

Each new subject (person) that was tested required an initial calibration of the eye-tracking camera and placement of tracking crosses, but sometimes they wriggled too much and the testers needed a relatively stable reference point to see if the camera required recalibration, without disturbing the subject too much.

During the testing, we found the same phenomenon as described later in this article by Laura Ruel and Nora Paul at the Online Journalism Review. Most men had a relatively fixed spot they would look at when awards were presented, while women flittered over the TV screen.

What's a design collective when it's not a design collective? Undenk describe themselves: "we take over spaces, stage events, stencil around, sticker places, reclaim the streets of the shrinking cities. From the Kunstsalon to a parking lot, we engineer situations of presentation."

Well, what interested us was that there is a little Perth element to this not-collective. Herb goes to WA® is "an epic image sequence adventure that allows you to trip from Melbourne to Perth in under three minutes." 1700 pictures in order leading up to a catacylismic stop an Uncle Colin's Place, via Wave Rock and The Middle of Nowhere...why? Who is Winston?

Some may be surprised to know it, but one of the world's biggest research institutes into interactive television is based in Perth, at Murdoch University.

Soon, many iTV technologies will be based on web principles, including the semantic web. So what are the difference between designing for iTV and the web (in terms of accessibility)?

456 Bereat Street has a great introductory article on the differences and how to cross the divide, at Accessibility and usability for interactive television.

Well, when you're procrastinating (as perhaps you are reading this stub) you may as well do it properly. BoingBoing, a "directory of wonderful" things is hit and miss, usually hit. But our favourite of late has been Kottke's home of fine hypertext products.

Where else could you learn about Schmidt Sting Pain Index, 16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn or the 10 most magnificent trees in the world? (FYI, baobabs come in at Number 1). Now that's procrastinating.

Generally, fonts are filetypes. They are tools you use to get a typeface on a piece of paper, milk carton, embroidered shirt or website.

Typefaces are designs. If you're a type nut have a read of Haley's article on the difference between the two.

It does sound like a fancy buzzword, but in fact Gestalt psychology is, for us, the 'ground rules' of design.

Our brains don't form rigid one-to-one assumptions about the world around us like a computer does. For example, if you draw a cup on a piece of paper, and draw another cup upside-down or on a different angle on a piece of paper, our brains will connect the two even though the lines that make up the 2D image are completely different.

We follow some general rules within this flexible, visual 'bubble' to make sense of what we are seeing, and if we can break these down and use them in design (print, web or iTV), we can make it easier to users to arrive at the assumptions we wanted them to have about the design, book or website.

Gestalt's Laws of Pragnanz are valuable rules for designers to understand, whether or not they follow them to the letter. A more comprehensive article with a good list of references is Clare Torrans' Gestalt and Instructional Design.

About fifty per cent of our web clients go through this process with us (the others already have their domain name organised). There are always so many questions: "Should I buy .com or .com.au?", "My business name is really long - should I put the whole name in the domain?", and "What if someone types it in wrong?".

How many times have you typed in 'BogPond' or 'BigPong' when meaning to type in Telstra's 'BigPond'? Inaccurate? Perhaps not. But you won't get to the page you wanted.

This article from Stylegala is a good starting point to answer those questions - although each case will be different. Other good articles on the topic include: Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name from the Site Wizard, and How to Choose a Good Domain Name from Vancouver's Stir.

"The software giant has seen its products banned in some of the biggest markets on earth--and it's all because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a dodgy choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary."

See the full article at News.com.

This blog, Shorpy, has a gorgeous catalogue of American photos taken (they say) about a hundred years ago, but the photographs taken in the forties and fifties are just spectacular.

They aren't your typical grey/black posed stern-faced photos - most of them are beautifully coloured and give you a real connection to the subject - hallmarks of good photography.

The blog is a little hard to navigate - the main navigation is on the right hand side but you lose it if you go into a gallery. The best way to play is to keep clicking on the 'random' link in the top right-hand corner.

Link discovered at Coudal.com.

Logo redesign is always a controversial issue, as many clients stuggle with losing the connection they have invested in previously in order to update their look.

In truth, a well designed logo won't date, and often the discontinuity with loyal clients can harm a good portion of the goodwill your company has carefully spent building.

On the other hand, if you have a poorly designed logo, it may be worth cutting the cord and going forth with a solid redesign to begin the credibility-building process.

Brand New is a great examination of good and bad logo redesigns. University logos feature heavily, as well as many Fortune 500 companies as well as small business. Well worth a read.

Typography is an ancient skill, which has been literally handcarved in detail since Gutenberg's first mysterious type press. For the first time in 500 years, we now have to apply the rules of lead slugs of type and punch cutters to a completely different medium - the web.

We react to certain designs in fairly predictable ways. If a document is laid out in a well-behaved, grid-like manner, we'll assume it has been set by a professional designer. If you read an email written in Comic Sans, you might assume the author is a female.

Applying original print type rules and fashions to the web is a difficult process - as designers, we've lost some of the control over the way people may read our text. Browsers and screens can be different sizes - we can't even guarantee that the correct font is on the user's system.

Richard Rutter has attempted to translate some of the universal principles of type to this liquid layout we have on the web, at The Elements of Typography - a great application of grid design.

Our doors are open and after a well earned New Year's break we be busy adjusting margins, kerning our characters, lining up our leading, and twiddling our divs.

We hope you all had a wonderful break and are looking forward to what looks like (for us!) a very exciting year.

Christmas is the best time of the year - it legitimises perfectly unacceptable behaviour. When else could you put otherwise unattractive tinsel up around your desk, or scull alcoholic egg drinks, yuk!

Well, we applaud it and we're in on the action - download our little Christmas hangy-things and decorate everyone's cubicles with some warm-and-fuzziness...

Yes, it's only November (or Movember for some of you), but that doesn't mean Christmas isn't approaching at a scarily fast velocity.

So think back...what did you say this time last year that you would be more organised doing this year? Organising Christmas cards for your clients!

Let Kuraman Creative make life easy for you with our electrified card machine, E-CARD-OMATIC!