Roundtable, a private investment partnership located in New York City, decided to collaborate with BadCat Design to redesign their logo as well as create an overall style guide document to keep their brand on track.
It was twenty years ago today
Just like (ok, kinda, sorta like) L. Jeffrey Zeldman’s website, BadCat.com celebrates its twentieth birthday this year – today, in fact! Let’s see if we can get a redesign to happen before the end of the year.
WordPress Page Builder Plugins
Recently we’ve found a number of drag and drop style plugins that extend WordPress page layout capabilities. They range from the simple to the complex, free and paid, easy and well… not so much.
Probably the best thing about most of these plugins is that they do not lock your content into a specific theme – allowing you to experiment with other themes without losing your content layout.
Some of the these plugins however, do lock you into their plugin, in that if you disable or delete the plugin, then the content itself can get lost. That’s bad news of course and in most cases there should be a fallback to unstyled content.
Specialty Printing and Papers
Just finished a beautifully printed three piece invitation for Roundtable Investment Partners. We chose Crane’s Lettra Espresso extra thick Cotton paper stock and used gold and white double stamped hot foils.
Software Rental – a cautionary tale
So here’s the issue I have with subscription-based or rental of application software… it’s the work and files I create that wind up being held hostage or worse–locked out forever.
Oh, my beautiful data
Historically, (for me that’s over 20 years with the Adobe applications as an example, but they’re certainly not the only pseudo-SaaS offender) I’ve purchased a “perpetual” software license and that software worked for as long as either the hardware or operating system that supported it. This meant that I could conceivably back up the OS, software and my files then later restore these and always have access to my files — preserved in time based on the hardware that ran everything. All was good and even Aldus FreeHand 2.02 lives another day. And so the tale begins.
WordPress Brute Force Botnet Hack Username Attempts
Over the last year or so we’ve been monitoring WordPress hack attempts. Everyone knows using an account named, “Admin” (which was the default WordPress login years back) is ripe for brute-force login attacks. What’s interesting is that the same sites often get attacked repeatedly with the same login username – but from the same IP – just at later dates.
Recently there’s been a major uptick in these WordPress brute force botnet attacks – while the attackers generally never get through, since we all have strong passwords, it does take away server resources.
ACVIM Web Redesign
The American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) is an organization that is dedicated to the discovery of new medical knowledge in the field of veterinary science, they increase public awareness of advances in veterinary medical care and they educate, train and certify veterinary specialists. ACVIM chose BadCat Design to redesign their website for them, which included changing the visual look of the site, but also reorganizing some of the navigational structure and architecture of the content to help users have a better online experience.
Bell Guilmet Associates: Design that Goes Anywhere
Patrick Bell and David Guilmet are owners of an eponymous design firm based in Solebury, Pennsylvania. They specialize in interior, architectural and project design for collectors of art and antiques. Their projects range from tasteful private home interiors to large event planning. Bell Guilmet needed an online presence that would stand out and support the elegance of their brand and at the same time showcase some of the unique projects they have designed, organized and executed.
MusicWorks 4 Kids Sparks Musical Interest in Young Minds
MusicWorks 4 Kids is a program that works closely with Kindermusik to expose children to use music at a young age and to use instruments as tools of self expression. Musicworks 4 Kids has been around since 1995 and their classes and music programs focus on the child and their family.
BadCat Relaunches Get Ready Kids!
Since 1993, Get Ready Kids has been providing customers with a wide variety of unique and special educational toys that are used at home and in schools. Get Ready Kids specializes in early childhood creative play toys, dramatic play toys and multicultural toys that are both fun and educational.
The Get Ready Kids website is an integral piece to their business because they are one of many stores that don’t have an actual storefront. The Get Ready Kids website is the main way they reach their customer base and let them know what they are able to order through their online catalogue.