Be A Design Group’s last survey showed that most of you really do read your design magazines. Wow. Good for you.

Rather than introduce a new survey question, I would like to encourage the web designers in the audience to take a few minutes to take A List Apart’s web design survey. I think they are correct when they say that “almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.” Let’s change that. Oh, and you might even win an iPod or shirt or something.

After a riviting few days of Mooninite conversation, I thought it was high time to add a little levity (though I must thank our readers for catapulting that discussion into our Top Ten posts, cementing my fake F’bomb onto our homepage for the foreseeable future).

Head on over to Typorganism.com and click on the link for the ASCII-O-Matic! This little devil will take any 60 x 50 pixel photo you upload and turn it into those crazy little type drawings, which you can screen-capture like me or generate HTML code to use however you’d like.. And it does a pretty good job, just check out Scarlett Johanssen above. I know I am. (source photo, geez fellas, now included after the jump.)

The trend-a-day email newsletter DailyCandy has received even more buzz than usual lately, due to a recent Wall Street Journal report that it was up for sale—for more than $100 million. According to an article in next week’s New York magazine, DailyCandy’s purchase (by “a big-time buyer”) is pending.

But there are those who, having sampled a morsel or two of DailyCandy, say they just don’t get it—what’s the big deal? So how did DailyCandy amass over one million subscribers and leave all of the other “Hey, look, buy this/go here!”-style newsletters in the dust? One word: branding.

The Match Factory opened their shop this week. What is TMF? Just another online commune of wicked-cool people involved in design, art, poetry, and film. Right now you can find a plethora of very cool posters for your office or crib, t-shirts, even a short film on DVD. Very cool indeed.

This begs the question: “Should Be a Design Group start an online store?” That depends on you, dear readers, and how much you’d look forward to joining the BADG tribe. Let us know what you think in the Comments section. Thanks —

I recently sat down to review the winners of the latest Communication Arts Interactive Annual, hoping that maybe this year there would finally be some standards-based web design included in the honors. What I saw was more of the same things I have seen in previous years: splash pages that lead to windows that maximize to cover your entire screen, tables instead of CSS layout, rebuilding of standard navigational elements such as scrollbars through the use of Flash, a locking-away of useful information in Flash and graphic files that would make Aldus Manutius turn in his grave, and even Flash intros. It really upset me to see the supposed “Holy Grail” of design competitions ignorantly perpetuating practices that are bad for design and even worse for the web.

There seems to be a huge communication gap between “designers” that develop the type of interactive material that appears in the Communication Arts Interactive Annual, and “designers” that develop standards-based interactive material. My theory is that the former school is full of print designers turned interactive designers. They develop interactive pieces that are visually stunning, and a delight to navigate to the patient user - who unfortunately doesn’t exist in their medium of choice. Years of print designing has apparently made them so anal about their control over type, and of their “user interface,” that they are willing to sacrifice everything that is good about web design just to use the font they want, and masturbate their egos with their experimental interfaces.

I don’t know whether the designers or the judges of the pieces in the competition just don’t know any better, or if I am missing something about these pieces that actually makes them represent the essence of the web medium, but the lack of mere mention of web standards, usability, or accessibility has CA’s publication reeking of ignorance.

If this were the cutting edge of web design, then web design would be in big trouble.

Here is my list of winners. These sites using cutting-edge technology, clear, user-centered design, accessible and standards-based markup, and a very efficient use of resources – yes, many of them are also visually stunning. You also may notice a theme of high user participation. By nature, with the web medium, your audience is part of the design.

• Google - The best design on the web. Accessibility of relevant information does what branding cannot.
• Flickr - “Your audience is part of the design.”
• Basecamp - This web-based project management application is simple yet powerful, incredibly user friendly.
• Bearskinrug - Who says standards-based can’t be expressive?
• Blogger.com - Giving good design to the people. The templates are the epitome of designing what hasn’t even been created yet.

2006 will certainly bring more great standards-based design. Let’s hope that Communication Arts recognizes some of it. For all of you standards-based designers out there, be sure to enter your web projects in Interactive Annual 12.

I doubt that anyone noticed that Be A Design Group’s code is now valid HTML. Although the site doesn’t work any differently, and everything looks exactly the same, I feel like this was a real accomplishment. I don’t know about you, but the web design I do is nothing like the web design I learned in school. When I started out, web design was just a matter of slicing up large Photoshop images. Now the sites I work on rely so heavily on coding that sometimes I wonder if this is even design. Almost everything I know about building a website I have learned on my own by trial and error. As I have grown into the role of web designer, things like validation, usability and stylesheets have become increasingly important to me. Whether I like it or not, I have turned into something I never would have thought possible: a programmer. At least that is what it seems like. Troubleshooting HTML sure doesn’t feel like graphic design. I doubt that there are many graphic designers that got into web design because of the appeal of learning HTML. Maybe all websites should be designed in Photoshop, and then a programmer should be hired to build the code. We are designers, not programmers, right? Wrong. Like it or not, a good web designer is going to have to be a good programmer, too. Disagree? Drop me some comments…