After participating in a lengthy Twitter discussion with John O’Nolan (twitter @JohnONolan), it has been agreed that JavaScript is “standard.”

So fellow web designers, after a long discussion I put it to you that JS is now “standard” and should be supported like CSS, not like Flash. – @JohnONolan

I wrote a previous article about discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6, and I think a discussion about JavaScript is in the same category.

The big question asked is why would you need to develop a site that works without JavaScript?

In short, you wouldn’t. It simply does not make sense with the current online environment. Take a look below for a few examples why.

1. Facebook uses it

The most used social networking site and currently one of the most elite sites on the web, nearly everyone uses Facebook. Try to load Facebook after disabling JavaScript in your browser and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

If Facebook relies so heavily on JavaScript and a huge percentage of internet users are on Facebook, does it really make sense for your site to require proper usability without JavaScript?

2. Everyone has it

Ok, I’m sure you will all jump at the opportunity to yell and scream because not 100% of people have JavaScript enabled, so I’ll backtrack a little and say that at least 95% of people have it.

My argument for this is the same as that for supporting IE6. If a user is browsing the web in IE6, or in this case browsing with JavaScript disabled, he/she is not my target market.

3. What is next?

If JavaScript is on par with CSS, as John mentions above, what is next? Do you think Flash will soon gain universal support? Should it?

Right now, Flash is the only way to accurately know exactly what the user is seeing. It does not matter what browser they are in, what fonts they have installed or even what OS they use, Flash is Flash.

As long as their Flash is up to date!

Can’t forget that key point. What are your thoughts on JavaScript and Flash in the future of the web?

Design Coding – Rap

South Park – Mac vs. PC

Font Fight – CollegeHumor

How NOT to use PowerPoint

Graphic Designer Baby

Bonus – Your Business Card is Crap

Social media can make or break a brand, a lesson Maytag learned the hard way.

Home appliance giant, Maytag, is facing some tough times ahead after Heather Armstrong (a.k.a. Dooce), number 26 on Forbes’ list of Most Influential Women in Media, had a less than satisfying experience.

You do not want to get on the wrong side of a woman with over 1 million twitter followers.

Maytag gave Heather the run-around after her brand new washing machine broke, take a look below to see her comments.

Will Maytag learn from this experience and possibly offer a public apology? Would that be enough? At this point it is the best option, and quite possibly the only option. Over at T3, Kate Donaho offers these final words:

However Dooce and Maytag settle the issue of the broken $1300 washing machine, it’s yet another cautionary tale for brands that a meaningful social media presence is an essential element of public relations.

Other companies have felt the wrath of social media. These examples will hopefully be yet another warning of how influential social media can be.

Fabio Sasso has become one of my online idols over the last year and a bit, mostly because of his fantastic website, Abduzeedo. The site offers countless tutorials based in Photoshop, Illustrator, Pixelmator and more, along with a ton of inspiration. That’s where this post comes in.

Sites of the Week is by far my favorite place to find inspiration on current web trends. You should all check it out, and yes, it is updated weekly.

Endless articles and blog posts are coming out with tutorials and references for HTML5 and CSS3, but when will these actually become the standard?

When will CSS3 be a practical way of styling a website?

The argument over designing for Internet Explorer 6 is still underway while we’re already moving on to IE9, so why worry about these new markup languages already? Even IE7 will not be compatible with CSS3, so I ask again, why bother using it? It is impossible to assume people will go right to the current IE8 or other modern browsers.

Don’t get me wrong, HTML5 and CSS3 will be a great new tool for designers and users alike. I don’t think it should be made such a big deal when it is so far from being the industry standard. CSS3.info is also asking if CSS3 is over-baked, and sure makes some good points. Make sure you read a few of the comments left there as well.

Maybe it’s 2 years, 5 years, or even 10 years before HTML5 and CSS3, but it will be the future of web design, and for good reason.

Please don’t take the title of this article sarcastically.

.net Magazine, a monthly internet magazine based out of the UK, recently issued an apology for some obscene words used in one of its advertisements. You can view the apology here.

I commend .net for its prompt action taken in response to some of the outcries that echoed through various social networking sites.

For any fellow writers and bloggers out there I want you to take a second and appreciate this. .net could have left the incident alone and hoped for the buzz to go down, but instead offered a public apology. This makes the magazine much more reputable and deserving of continued reading.

Well done .net!

Can colour be owned?

In one word, yes. If you have ever taken a look at a colour swatch book you will know there are seemingly endless amounts of options, but those options are quickly becoming limited. For example:

The colour magenta is fully owned by T-mobile. Is this for real? Yes. Deutsche Telekom, parent company to T-mobile, has the full rights to the colour and has taken legal action against a book-on-demand publisher, and the above logo, engadget mobile for the use of it.

What’s Next?

Think about some of the great brands of the world. Think about the colours associated with them. What happens if all of these colours get trademarked? Forget about coming up with new ideas, how are designers supposed to come up with new colours? Their hands will be tied in almost everything they do.

Copyrighting colour is as futile as the copyrighting of a celebrity’s names.

I’ll leave you with a quote from an article on Six Revisions.com (be sure to check out the Six Revisions for a more in-depth analysis on color in design):

Marketing research has found 80% of visual information is related to color. It’s not just a green, a red, a blue, or a magenta. It’s “Starbucks Green”, “Coke Red”, “Gap Blue”, and “T-Mobile Magenta.”

Sprye Studios has complied a list of 50 great websites based on some creative CSS layouts that have been submitted to the CSS Awards this year.

Be sure to check out the great collection, maybe you’ll be inspired enough to whip up a design and submit it to the CSS Awards for your chance to get noticed.

Browse. Buy. Download.

That is Brandstack’s idea of a perfect logo design process. People can go to this popular site to browse logos that are for sale by designers. Many people use this site as a place to put up logos that they have completed for fun or on a whim when an idea came into their heads, while others design for the purpose of selling designs on the site.

Why hire a single freelance logo designer when you can search through thousands of pre-made ones online? Pricing start as low as $250, a very reasonable budget for a new company looking for an image and top out at $210,000. I can only image that people willing to spend that type of money on a logo will be looking elsewhere, but alas, they do exist.

Fellow blogger Selvin Ortiz has compiled a handful of reasons why he cannot stand this logo-sourcing giant in his article, Why I Hate Brandstack. In it, Selvin’s first two arguments are quality control and target market.

Quality Control

Browse through a few pages on Brandstack and you’ll see what Selvin is talking about. Without a doubt there are some fantastic concepts on the site, such as these 20 Great Logos From Brandstack, but there are also a lot that should not have made the cut.

Take the below logos for example:

$29,000

$30,000

Do these prices really justify the design, let alone the thought that went into them?

Crowd-Sourcing

Wes Wilson, founder of Brandstack, has this to say regarding his site’s comparison with other crowd-sourcing websites:

The biggest difference with crowd sourcing models and Brandstack is that all participating designers can benefit from Brandstack’s model. With most crowd sourcing efforts there is one “client” and several “contributors”. That normally leads to one “winner” and several “losers”. With Brandstack there isn’t an open or close date, so your work can be purchased at anytime. If it works as planned, everyone’s designs will sell and everyone will “win”. – via interview at Little Box of Ideas

In theory it is much better, but what about in reality?

Copyright?

Since these logos do not exist as part of a company and most likely have no legal representation behind them, what is stopping these designs and concepts to be ripped off? There have been many horror stories of this happening, leading to a number of former users to withdraw from using the service.

This is not how logo design should be.

Time, research, thought and individuality should all be things considered when creating a new logo. A logo should say something about the company, and how can these logos have anything to say without even knowing its potential buyer?

Look at the logo process of respected designers Jacob Cass or David Airey and you can literally see how much they put into their simple, yet effective logos. Brandstack offers nothing remotely close.

What do you think?

Could this tool be used for good? Should designers continue to use sites like this to sell their work?

I decided to include a quick contact form in the footer of my new web page design (seen here). I taught myself the basics of PHP to get the form working and all was well.

A few days ago I started getting a lot of spam through this quick contact form. I searched the web high and low all day to find a way to stop these annoying spam bots. Finally I came across a simple solution that has worked wonders so far.

Spam bots are not smart, and will try to fill out every available input area in order to fulfill any potential required fields. How can we use this to our advantage? We will use what is commonly referred to as a honeypot.

A honeypot is an invisible field that lures spam bots to enter text into it, but we want it to be empty.

1. Add the invisible input area with the following code:<input style="display:none; visibility:hidden;" name="validation" type="text" />
2. Define honeypot in your .php file as:$honeypot = $_POST['validation'] ;
3. Then insert the following:if (!empty($honeypot)) {
header( "Location: http://www.domain.com/your-error-page.html" );
}
4. Most likely, you will change that if to elseif and put it inside your main function.

That’s it. Now your form should work just like normal, except it will go to your error page and not submit if that hidden field has text in it. Remove the style from the input tag and test it for yourself.

Thanks to Doug Hockinson for having a site with such great resources.