It is time for our round up of a year which has flown by. What started as a career in one direction, took a major U-turn and went in another.

Marc and I have been in web design for 5 years but in the last 4 months we have learnt more than the rest combined. This all occurred because we started this blog. Since starting this blog we have met some awesome people which have provided us help and business.

It is too easy for us to post our 1 million top websites for 2008, but there are already tonnes of websites doing it, plus we like to be different (...like creating our own blogging system... WHY?!?!) so this is more about OBOX-Design than anything else.

I just want to know. Where have they gone?

UPDATE: They were hacked.

While designing We Are not Freelancers we had one goal in mind. Our goal was to get featured on as many web galleries as possible.

We knew that by putting as much effort as we could into our design, the benefits of increased traffic would be awesome.

We first got into the blogging world with our website blog 'We Are not Freelancers'. The site is a combo of the 'Ten Pixel Method' and hand drawn characters and letters. A lot of people who we have met say they wish they could create something simila,r but will not because they can't draw.

We say anyone can draw if you use a simple technique.

David gives you a quick lesson on how to create a hand drawn website using the 'don't lift the pencil' technique.

Designing a web application is something that most of you who read our blog will be familiar with, whether it be through designing an interface or coding the back-end, or both. And because of that you can relate to how difficult it is to get your site bug-free and ready for public release. I know that some companies like to bring in other web people to test their sites, and although it's better than doing it yourself, you can't replace the real thing - the end user.

This post already exists on From-the-Couch but I feel that it can be on both sites:

David takes you through the steps of creating a website (AAA Spa) for if&but Network di Comunicazione, one of OBOX Designs clients from Italy.

I am a padding addict. I love padding so much that if I turned into a pillow I would probably be happy.

No seriously. I consider margins and padding to be more critical than 960.gs or the 10px method. You can have the best grid based layout but if your padding / margins are out it will not look good.

When we first started We Are not Freelancers a lot of business opportunities and new clients came through the wood work.

Since then we have been working on multiple projects which came directly from this blog. Of the six projects four of them have been completed but of those four I can only show you one of them for now. The reason being is that the other three are still being worked on by the people who we did the work for (we did the designs, they are doing the programming).

In the following post I will show you a site which was launched just one week ago called The Operators. The Operators is run by a seriously skilled photoshopper called Kai Bastard, some of the work featured on the site is truly awesome.