The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you’re reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks.

Actually, flash itself doesn't suck. But the way some sites use it does. This article will point out when and how to avoid these sucky situations.

One of our favorite types of logo design is clever use of negative space. The WOW feeling when people recognize hidden message is the great moment that many logo designers strike for. Below are couple of great logos that we want to feature:

It's not just an 'e'. It's Egg-n-Spoon.

Photo courtesy of oliviermela

We were introduced to Frank Vossen, a Belgian expat in Ho Chi Minh city by our good client Christian Dutilh - another expat from Netherlands. Frank is a very nice and relaxing man even he owns 3-4 businesses - which should make him super busy. He really knows how to work with the design agency: respect their expertise, listen to ideas that are different from his own and feedback very quickly.

With perfect collaboration, our projects really flow. We made two websites: SEDITEX Consulting and Horizon Real Estate (owned by his wife - Quynh) in about a month and both the client and Coffeemug are very happy with the project outcome.

Yesterday afternoon, we asked for Frank and his wife's testimonials and when we opened our emails this morning, we already received them. They also invited us for dinner at their Thai restaurant, another business of Frank that we are going to make another website for.

Many thanks to Frank for his kindness and great collaborative efforts during the projects, and to Chris for introducing such a wonderful client.

We - Coffeemuggers find out that the key to successful projects is to spend a certain amount of time to have fun and we really enjoy the entertaining comics series "Freelance Freedom" at FreelanceSwitch. You may also view great articles there on how to quit your day job and set up profitable freelancing business.

Photo courtesy of Amelia PS

When hearing of home-based office, the first thing that pops in your mind is possibly a messy room where a reckless designer is working in his pyjamas. It has a lot of unclean coffee cups and papers, pencils, CDs are thrown "freely" everywhere... Well, that's NOT true, absolutely not.

Most of the time, there are two types of persons who will set up a home-based office: newly graduate students who hate to work for someone else and tired employees who just quited their day jobs (I happened to be both of these types). Those persons are usually independent, self-disciplined and have fairly strong personality. Obviously, an untidy home-based business will soon be out of the game.

As you may know, Coffeemug is built upon the famous Joomla CMS. Our old contact page used Joomla default contact component, which is fine, but not very convenient for visitors, especially when it comes to validation.

At first we planned to rewrite the component. However, that seems to be a bit time-consuming, and later version upgrade of the site may cause troubles, so we decided to rewrite a PHP form only. And our journey starts, with... a google search for the suitable form engine.

Photo courtesy of Catherine Jamieson

After a month and a half, we finally have something to show you. A picture is worth a thousand words and our portfolio is worth a thousands lines of copywriting...

It takes us quite a while to come up with this page. At first we want to have some sort of gallery portfolio that shows thumbnails of each project, and then let you browse inside every specific one. This approach sounds cool but takes horribly long time to update - that deserves to be spent for exciting projects instead - when we wanna show off a new project.

At the end of the day, what are the most important factors that raise our credits and your perception of Coffeemug? Real people, real reviews, and real projects. Voila! The current portfolio page can't be simpler with the left hand side column for super kind clients who spends time talking about us and the right hand side column show links to website that we made. Only live website is shown. It can't be any simpler or more effective. No gallery, no sub-pages, no hassle. A page that takes minutes (<15) to update, and seconds to browse through.

We will update our portfolio page a lot, so check it out frequently. Special projects will be featured in this blog.

Photo courtesy of timothysschenck

After 6 months of preparation, we are proud to launch Coffeemug, a tiny web studio that focuses into serving small-medium clients in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.

Why Coffeemug rocks?

• Affordable price: we don't have overhead cost like giant corporations, and we wisely make use of great open source software such as: Linux, GIMP, Open Office...
• Smart solutions: we know that everyone loves simplicity. Coffeemug will always analyze your needs in deep, and then come up with the simplest solution that best match your time/budget/expertise.
• Fast: instead of making websites in months, we make them in days. The reason is simple: if we are not available, we don't take new project requests. Your website means much more than "just a website" to us.
• Good services: by "good" we mean be there when you call/email, update stuff quickly and always follow up. That is kinda "easier said than done". We can really do it though ;)

Give us a try, will ya?