Popped out for Christmas, back 2nd January.

Christmas cards are a nice way to send out a little Christmas cheer in December, but that buzz doesn't last so long and within a few weeks the cards are heading to be recycled. Charity Christmas cards help add something more worthwhile to the act of card giving but the amount that goes to charity depends on the cost of producing the cards themselves.

2013 will mark Bronco’s 10th birthday and as the company has grown over those 10 years we’ve done our best to repay the hard work of our team. But while we’ve always tried to ensure our people are comfortable both inside and outside of working hours we’ve lacked a stunning office in which to do the amazing work we do. Our team deserve an environment that has a positive influence on their working lives.

That’s why (hopefully) in 9 weeks time we will be moving into brand new offices marking the biggest change for our team in quite some time.

The artist, Picasso said “Good artists copy but great artists steal”.

It’s a quote many artists and designers have come across and it concerns the originality of an idea. Picasso understood that an idea does not simply pop into existence but is instead grows over time. The ideas you have can either be consciously taken from seeing a great idea at work or moulded in your mind from a lifetime of sights and experiences.

Bronco has taken a step towards broadening our expertise, with the addition of a new online gaming subsidiary of our brand, as we increase our business offering into a whole new business niche, alongside the specialisms in Search Marketing and web development that we already have.

If you were to look back on the big developments in web design over the past year one of the biggest changes would be that of the apparent mainstream adoption of CSS pre-processors.

CSS pre-processors allow more complex programming code to be used when writing CSS. Commonly these allow the addition of variables, loops, mathematical operators and more. The pre-processor will then automagically take this complex code and transform it into traditional CSS for use in a website.

Yesterday our design and development team launched the redesigned Data Label website. Data Label is an asset and barcode label manufacturer and supplier. When they contacted Bronco the brief was simple "turn a now ageing and inflexible website into a modern reflection of the company that will adapt to the company’s growing future".

Everyone loves social networks, right? It’s redefined the way we communicate and consume information. With so many with Twitter or/and Facebook accounts it was inevitable that cash hungry companies would look to social networks as a new marketing channel.

There’s an old proverb that says “Knowledge is Power” (Scientia potentia est in Latin) and in more modern times you might have heard “With great power comes great responsibility”. So if you do some math you might come up with the less catchy “Knowledge is a responsibility”.

It seems that, on the web at least, design is no longer a good explanation of the process of creating the visual layer of a website. Instead we now have User Interface (UI) design and User Experience (UX) design; the former being concerned with the aesthetic quality of a design and the latter on how a person interacts with a website or service.