Blog

When the up-and-coming social media company Wantsa came to us to design their website, they wanted to ensure one thing: that their product was conveyed clearly to their diverse users. The experienced creative team at Cowie and Fox knew exactly what to do, and began by evolving an inventive logo, brand and look-and-feel for their online presence. We took their complex multi-layered product and conveyed it simply, straightforwardly and effectively getting to the root of what social networking is all about, communication.

Visit Wantsa website »

At BC Dairy they believe natural is best, and the team at Cowie and Fox couldn’t agree more. The “Buy Local, Eat Natural. Real Cream” campaign, developed by C&F, focused not only on the sales of cream in BC, but also on the importance of eating natural foods. And what better way to convince consumers about the benefits of Real Cream than to have them sample it? (more…)

Altruism, the 21st century way.

The Cowie and Fox team are proud supporters of Help a Hospital, a charitable organization whose new website is an excellent example of an open-source e-commerce solution to business management. Customized specifically for their needs, Help a Hospital’s site allows partner Hospitals to manage “wish lists” and receive donations more efficiently that ever before.

Visit Help a Hospital website »

Lili Blossom is Vancouver’s newest online natural skin care retailer, and like Cowie and Fox, they love the environment! We love their unique approach to skin care and their efforts to respect the planet by reducing their environmental impact.

So, when they asked us to develop their name, brand strategy, look-and-feel, logo and website the answer was “yes,” naturally.

Visit Lili Blossom website »

I’ve started seeing a number of sites cropping up lately that use fonts with custom font family names, such as http://designintellection.com/

Digging around, I discovered that they’re using real fonts, using css @font-face.

It looks like it’s finally coming folks – your favourite font on your website, and not using Flash replacement text or a replacement image! There are still hurdles, and the font needs to be licensed for web use.

Here are some resources I’ve found:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ has fonts you can acquire with the proper licensing.

http://typekit.com/ is a site that provides a font-streaming service and includes font libraries for you to use.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/11/web-open-font-format-backed-by-mozilla-type-foundries.ars has a history of the web font format.

http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/becoming-a-font-embedding-master has a real hands-on tutorial on how to get real fonts working on your site.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/on-web-typography/ is an article on designing websites with these new-found choices we have coming up.

http://webfontspecimen.com/ is a downloadable template for testing how a font will look on the web.

You want to turn a button into a sprite, but you also want to have the text there for accessibility!

What do you do? You use the text indent property:

text-indent:-6000px; overflow:hidden; cursor:pointer;

Have you checked IE7? If the text is still there, try this:

color: transparent; text-transform: capitalize;

Yes, it is a hack, but it works great. And yes, you do have to have the capitalize transform or else it won’t work.

Here is everything you need to get your super awesome usable sprites working across all browsers:

.mybutton{background:transparent url(”mybackground.png”) 0 0 no-repeat; border:none;  text-indent:-6000px; overflow:hidden; cursor:pointer; color: transparent; text-transform: capitalize;}
have fun!

Just before the New Year, Cowie and Fox launched Lili Blossom, an online beauty retail boutique. You can find the most amazing gifts for others and a little indugence for yourself too! Lili Blossom features a unique variety of products with beautiful scents as well as unscented for sensitive skin. You’ll be able to find something perfect to suit almost anyone you’re shopping for.

One of my favorite lotions is Malie. When you open the bottle it’s like a mini tropical vacation inside, it’s fragrant, but not too strong (i’m one of those people that doesn’t like perfumed products). I was also impressed with how it softens the skin. Definately a must have product!

I’ve worked on Semperviva newsletters for a while, pretty much since the initial few, and it has gone through a few design refinements. The first change was inspired by a new Semperviva website and the other times is was just a push for bigger imagery and massaging in the top banner area. After doing so many, it’s interesting to go back and look at some of them. Semperviva is a great client and they allow great creative freedom.

Check out the newsletter archive

With Apple’s announcement of the new Magic Mouse, it’s clear that the new frontier for UI design is multi-touch. When you get over the wow factor of the Magic Mouse, you can move on 10/GUI by C. Miller. This is the first demo I’ve seen that has convinced me that touch screens can take us away from the mouse.

Check out our latest touch screen technology website for 2010 Legacies Now, www.2010andbeyond.ca

This is a Flash website built with Action Script 3 coding and it features a backend api that integrates the site with a content management system built upon the PHP Symphony framework. It’s Flash, but it’s search engine friendly because it utilizes deep linking and mirrored HTML SEO/Usability content.