Welcome to the Kobot blog! Personally, I (Jodie) have always felt more of the “new year, new me” impulse in the fall than in the New Year. So that is my explanation for why we’ve had a fully redone, rebranded website since February (Pretty slick, eh?) and we’re just getting this blog rolling now. But better late than never, right?
AKA: What the heck is it and why are we doing it?
One of the things we think makes us great is we’re pretty darn friendly. We work in an industry that can, from the outside, seem a little opaque—maybe even a little like modern witchcraft. But we don’t think that’s the case! Websites are for everyone!
With that in mind, a little over a month ago we had the idea to start a weekly livestream called Ask Kobot Anything. We are 4 episodes in now and are having a blast, so we thought this venture deserved to be mentioned on our blog.
We’re doing these bite-sized broadcasts on our Instagram every Friday at 11:30 am. The purpose is not only for us to talk about our work and our industry, but also to give you a vessel to get all your questions answered by some friendly faces!
We’ve already touched on many topics, so here’s a quick recap:
Week 1:
- The most fulfilling parts of our job
- Our favourite projects to work on this year
- Serif or sans-serif (the answer was actually slab serif!)
- Why our neighbour’s tomatoes didn’t grow (He may or may not have watered inconsistently. No one can know for sure)
Week 2:
- The most recent Digital Project Managers meetup
- Kobot’s 18th birthday
- What made Bryan want to be a designer
- Some of our influences
- On request, we made a Kobot playlist
- Good v. bad trends in website design
- Sketch vs InVision (we use Sketch)
- Productivity tools and tricks we use in the office (Monday.com, Asana, Tide, bullet journalling)
Week 3:
- How many tabs we have open
- A hot browser debate (#deepnerd, but Chrome definitely won)
- National Learn to Code Day and Canada Learning Code
- Our colleague/officemate/pal Amanda Schutz’s exhibition The Living Valley at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts
- Kobot’s brand of corporate culture
Week 4:
- Meet the Kobots
- Advice for new grads
- An office tour
- Punk rock lyfe & how it affects our working style
- Shout outs to this amazing book, Nuit Blanche, and Edmonton Content Strategy meetup
As you can see, while we mainly have a focus on web design et cetera, we will basically answer anything. The world is your oyster!
No one has asked us the 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck question yet. What’s up with that?
– Stefan
This is a pretty casual thang, so we may tweak the format as we continue finding our legs.
The next few episodes will revolve around a central topic or theme and go from there. To that end, we’d love to take suggestions from you, dear listeners, on what topics you’d like to see us cover. So email us, tweet us or DM us on Instagram! We also got some nifty new stickers, and as we are not above bribery, we will mail some out to anyone who sends us a question.
And who knows, maybe we’ll take the show on the road (invite us to your office!) or maybe we’ll have guests??!! (Just come on the show already, Jasmin).
So please keep tuning in, sending us questions, and check back on our blog for more discussions, recaps, link roundups, and all that other good stuff. Thanks to everyone who has watched so far or sent in a question. We <3 u.