We are very pleased to announce the launch of Bar-Specialists.com.

The Bar Specialists are a highly skilled and experienced squad of bar tenders, event organisers and bar designers at the cutting edge of liquid catering culture. The client, rather refreshingly (pun intended) came to us with a few gigabytes worth of professional photography and a very slick concept idea.

We then started up the Offset Media machine and the outcome was this rather snazzy, simple yet dynamic full splash website that supports a wide range of devices and browsers and is driven by the wordpress system.

Feel free to take a look at the results.

Nick Smith is a specialist in the area of Interiors and Architectural photography. He also has a super keen eye and tremendous skill when it comes to fashion photography, portraiture and fine art photography.

We have recently built and launched his new blog. The blog will house monthly updates of his work. Friends, clients, colleagues and interested parties can now keep up to date Nick Smith’s progress.

You can view his blog here or visit his main website here.

We are proud to announce the launch of PremaeSkincare.com. Over the last month we have been working hard alongside Clare Eluka (C.E.O and Founder of Premae Skincare) to build their online sales platform and create their product packaging designs.

Clare is a advocate for allergen free, eco friendly products and ethical principles in business. Premae is the world’s first totally allergen free beauty brand. She has spent much time in the area of research and development in order to discover how to create her comprehensive cleansing and moisturising system. What makes the Premae product range so special is that they are made with only 100% natural allergen free ingredients.

Looking for something special this Christmas for a loved one?  PremaeSkincare.com

Here is a very interesting idea by Alexander Chen, a project called Baroque.me. A visualisation of Bach Cello Suites No. 1, Prelude where notes are replaced by strings and their pitch is determined by length. To get a better understanding of the project check out Chen’s blog post.

We just released a tabbing plugin for jQuery—tinytabs. It is open source under the MIT license. You can see it in action and download it here.

While jQuery UI and a bunch of other plugins support tabbing, sometimes, you don’t need all that overheard just to render a simple tabbed UI. I wrote tinytabs for this reason, to eliminate the unnecessary overhead. At less than 1 KB (minified), it does exactly what it is designed to do.

Here is a great and moving speech by the late Steve Jobs. Leading a very interesting and eventful life, he has been an inspiration to many and has had a huge impact on the modern world. His passing is not just a loss for Apple, but the entire industry.

Rest in peace.

In Apple related news; we have just purchased a brand new iPad 2, now that we are venturing into developing apps for the iOS platform. We think it is a great addition to our collection of development devices that include Blackberries, Android and Windows Phone 7. It’s also now our “weapon of choice” when it comes down to taking minuets at meetings and showcasing work to clients whilst on the move.

crowdSPRING have recently released infographic poster detailing the effects of social media marketing for small businesses. There are some interesting figures in there, namely the successfulness of social media marketing for small businesses but not as much for medium to large businesses. It also seems that twitter is just beating facebook for brand loyalty with 64% of twitter users being more likely to buy the brand they follow. Overall though, it seem that facebook takes the social media crown sending more traffic to the band’s website and generating more sales leads.

At offset we are definitely pro social media, and generally advice our clients to adopt at least one . Although in our experience, it is not about blanketing the brand on every social website, not all forms social media are suited to every brand. Also, social media marketing requires a lot of input and time, and you can only get out of it what you put in (just take a look at Gary Vaynerchuk). With all the positives of online social media, you should not forget the merits of being social in physical world.

We have just launched willyouwed.me. A fun little website that takes out all the bother of that otherwise nerve-racking question. Give it a go!

We have just helped launched the new Illustrator’s Lounge daily blog. Focused on showcasing work from illustrators of all fields and backgrounds, it already has great content. There is even a ‘Cabinet of Curiosities‘ which is bursting with helpful free downloads like fonts and textures.

You can follow The Illustrator’s Lounge’s progress via their twitter page – @the_loungers

On Wednesday the 15th we held a presentation at the GRIP NHS Language services headquarters in Soho to unveil the shiny new recruitment system we have been developing over the last year. It was a great success and we are hopefully rolling this out and putting it into action by the end of next month. This system not only allows their operations department to manage their recruitment phases efficiently but will also form an integral part of their general HR management.