“We’re seeing a shift in consumer habits. Everything is moving towards cat videos, and the agencies that don’t recognise that, will get left behind.”

To stay on top of the ever-changing advertising landscape, john st. has opened the world’s first cat video division. With production, filming and seeding all in-house. Ask yourself, what can cat videos do for your business?

You’ve waited a long time. You almost considered buying the black version, but you knew the slick shiny whiteness would be worth it. The white Apple iPhone. Who wouldn’t want to have one?

Doug Aamoth of Time’s Techland blog reports further on the day that Apple fanboys and girls almost despaired would never come, and how now that it has, they’ve got 0.2mm more than they expected.

A man returns home with his newly-purchased white iPhone. Ten months of waiting—HE THOUGHT THIS DAY WOULD NEVER COME!

His trembling hands struggle to remove the cellophane surrounding Apple’s minimalist, yet irresistible product packaging. “I wish my fingers were knives!” he sputters to himself, breathless with anticipation.

Finally, the cellophane is no more. He grabs the box and gently shakes it up and down, waiting for WHAT SEEMS LIKE AGES for that weird, science-y suction phenomenon that holds box tops against box bottoms in a tender embrace to finally run its course. He imagines the box halves screaming to each other, “I’ll never forget you!” until they’re finally separated like high school sweethearts going off to different colleges.

And there it is. Ten months in a single moment. The white iPhone.

He feverishly removes the protective case from his black iPhone—the vile, wretched slab that he begrudgingly purchased while he hoped against hope for Apple to save him from his own private hell—and as he seductively slides the case onto his new iPhone, his world comes crashing down.

It won’t fit.

Read more: DEVASTATION: White iPhone 0.2mm Thicker Than Black One

As of WordPress 3.1, some post and page editing options have been hidden, including the Except field.

While WordPress moves closer and closer to becoming a full featured CMS, it still requires many work-arounds and around-about ways of working to fit it’s many square edges into the more typical CMS round hole. The Excerpt field is one of these—nominally a field to add an excerpt about a post which can be used as a teaser when theming, it can also be used as a secondary content field of the type that Drupal’s Field Module cooks for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

As of WordPress 3.1, rightly or wrongly the Excerpt field—together with Custom Fields and several other essential fields—has been hidden from view by default in the Post & Page edit Administration Panels, and to be revealed must be explicitly turned on in the Screen Options tab.

According to the WordPress Codex itself:

Note: As of WordPress version 3.1, some screen options on the Post & Page edit Administration Panels are hidden by default. The Excerpt field is hidden by default if it has not been used before.

A simple fix to a modification one presumes intended to simplify the user experience, but a modification nonetheless sweeping enough to cause the unwitting front-end developer sleepless nights when unnoticed.

WordPress magician and SEO expert Joost de Valk writes that a WordPress plugin or theme should never have to output inline styles, especially not in the frontend.

As all good front end developers know, inline styles will prevent some doctypes from validating, and they are also a factor to slow down your page loads—now more than ever a critical factor in SEO as well as user experience, since Google added load time to its ranking algorithm.

Joost continues:

If your plugin outputs a piece of code that needs styling, add an ID to the output and output the style using a style tag in the . Next to that you should add an option to remove the style altogether, and tell users how to add the CSS to their own theme’s stylesheet.

I hope all front end developers (and plugin developers) are taking note…

Read more from Joost de Valk: Optional Styles

Firefox is now officially the world’s most popular web browser, but it seems it is popular in other worlds as well…

Kotuku Spring Water is a bottled water business seeking to market water with a uniquely New Zealand indentity.

To float to the top of a crowded water market, something special was required—a Special Operation in branding and design.

The kotuku or white heron is a special bird in New Zealand Maori culture, and together with a subtle, contemporary typography, a two-colour bottle label was designed with an image of the kotuku in full flight as centre-piece.

Bottle label complete and branding mission accomplished, another happy client received the Special Operations special treatment.

Big Love: Love Your Life, Love Your Planet is a bottled water business seeking to market New Zealand water to an already saturated South East Asian market.

With the design of existing brands in the marketplace unsophisticated at best, something special was required for a new brand to float to the top—a Special Operation.

The logo designed represents the core mission of the company—selling superior quality, environmentally aware New Zealand water—with the message of loving the environment infused with the iconic phrase “Big Love.”

Branding complete and mission accomplished, another happy client received the Special Operations special treatment.

YOU Life and Performance Coaching offers a range of coaching scenarios to stretch and challenge you, and to take your thinking and performance to higher levels.

That’s a special business offer, and one which requires a very special website. Enter the website specialists, Special Operations.

With battle plans drafted and an outstanding design meticulously crafted by Wellington, New Zealand based designers The Penningtons, a special operative was needed to bring everything to online life, with perfectly scripted code.

Although on the face a simple brochure site, great care was taken to ensure that every aspect of the site matched to the pixel the excellent design.

The result? All mission targets were met, and with a very special website launched into battle, the Special Operations special treatment was delivered once more.

Website designed by The Penningtons.

Brother and sister designers Michael and Nicola Pennington are special, and so is the Wellington, New Zealand design company they run—The Penningtons.

A special company requires a special website, and when it came time for The Penningtons to update their existing static site to something a little more, well… special—Special Operations got the call.

The brief required every single aspect of the site—slideshow, client list, portfolio and case studies—to be able to be updated, and so possibly the world’s easiest to use Content Management System—WordPress—was deployed—with a considerable degree of custom coding behind the scenes.

The result: all mission targets were met, and with a very special website launched into battle, the special treatment was delivered once more.

A musical concert tour through Europe requested a special t-shirt to commemorate a series of performances in ten cities in ten days, a special operation for a branding and design specialist.

As the tour was without a coherent brand, typography, symbols and imagery were created to match the lofty aspirations of a concert series entitled Songs of the Soul—a bird, a floating balloon, an intricately patterned heart.

T-shirts designed and mission complete, another happy client received the Special Operations special treatment.