Voting systems come in different flavours; some are based on a poll, some let you choose between two entries and vote for the better one (usually called “hot or not”), and there also those enabling people to vote for one entry (or more) from a larger group of entries. The latter is commonly used in various competitions, though some voting systems are better executed than others.

One of the better ways of letting people vote is to employ social media like Facebook. This is was I used for my client Popcorn Horror, a great horror-oriented mobile app. They run a competition for the best scary make-up, called Monster Make-up Event 2012, and wanted their community to vote for the best entry among the competition’s finalists. I suggested to use Facebook “likes” as votes and, because the guys at Popcorn Horror wanted also a commeting system, we also used Facebook comments plugin.

Voting with Facebook has two four advantages:

Excellent anti-cheating mechanism – every voter needs a FB account to “like” and you can “like” only once. You don’t need to worry about IP addresses, sessions, web cookies etc.

Exposure – every vote is visible on Facebook wall, so all friends of the voters will see a reference to your website

Social networking – voting via Facebook means that contestants and some voters are more likely going to spread the word via the same social media

Quick implementation – voting with Facebook is easy to set up and doesn’t require any extra development, apart from some HTML and Facebook social graph meta data magic.

Have a look at Popcorn Horror’s voting page at http://www.popcornhorror.com/events/ and vote if you like for one of the entries Voting ends on 27/04/2012.

There is a new competition from Durex for all graphic designers and everyone else wanting to try their graphic skills. The task it to design the new Durex condom box, you can either use your own software or the online tool available on the contest’s website. Every week a new winner will be moved to the grand final with the top prize (apart from the new iPad and Durex products supply given to every week’s winner) is £2000 plus the chance to work with “Reckitt Benckiser’s third party design agency to finalise the design for use on physical pack(s) that will be launched for sale by Reckitt Benckiser”.

Anyway, here is my entry:

Feel free to vote for it here  and submit your own design on www.designdurexbox.com. The competition runs from 10:00am 7 March 2012 until midnight UK time on 17 April 2012.

Remember the times when the term “Internet Explorer” was identical with “browsing the Internet”? There were no other browsers (or at least they did not have any significant market share back then), so everyone used IE and was quite happy with it. But then other web browsers came into light and while some did not make it through the browser wars (see Netscape Navigator), others became quite successful and very often overtook our old IE. Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari won not because there were simply new, but they were (and usually still are) more secure and better supported web standards.

I used to be one of the many people telling their family, friends, colleagues and clients to move away from Internet Explorer as this particular web browser used to be really bad for web design. While other browsers rendered code correctly, IE almost always had a problem and rendered an element or a whole website differently. This led to web designers creating special fixes and workarounds just for IE so the user experience stays the same no matter what web browser was used.

But the times have changed and Microsoft has done some excellent work to bring its browser back to the party. IE9 is a pretty fast web browser that does not have any major issues with web standards (s far as I know) and I, as a web designer, am really happy to see all major web browsers work just fine.

And now Microsoft is doing what it can do get their users back. You can now play Cut the Rope for free (make sure to use IE to be able to play all levels) but you can also watch this funny ad which ridicules your typical “say NO to IE” guy, so me too I guess. But I don’t mind it as I don’t have a cat. Enjoy!

Today many websites were temporarily closed today in protest of online anti-piracy laws that U.S. Congress may vote in favour of, Wikipedia being probably the most noticable protester. That said, only English edition of Wikipedia seems to be blacked out. Apart from some websites closing for 24 hours, there are also other (like Google) giving their support to the cause.

You could ask: why they are protesting against online anti-piracy laws? Is not piracy bad for everyone? SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are believed to not only hunt piracy, but also hurt the Internet, so businesses and individuals, by allowing to take down every website where there is a suspition of copyright infingement, without court order etc. Mind you, this applies to USA, although there has been initially idea to also block websites outside of U.S. for USA citizens – this was abandonded recently though. You can also imagine how disastrous this all could be.

While I am all for anti-infingement laws, as it also affects badly web design industry, you cannot simply close or ban whatever you want just because there is a risk that some of the content of the website is thought to be infringing someone’s copyright. First of all, this needs to be proven and even if it is, it is not always harmful enough to take such strict actions. How many times I have seen someone using a photo on their website that was not licensed to them not even knowing that they should get a lincence first? Not that this is good, but why cut off a hand for stealing a box of matches, when a simple warning would suffice? SOPA and PIPA want to not only cut of your hand, but your head too, just to save courts some time.

And what do you think? Is it something you would support?

Merry Christmas everyone! It is time for joy and some quality family time… and definitely a break from work. The New Year is coming and, with it, new hopes and goals. May the new year be even better than 2011 and if you need any web design or graphic design services to make it happen, you know how to reach me

Please note that between 21/12/2011-06/01/2012 I am on holiday, but should check my emails from time to time.

Once again Merry Christmas!

The time has come, however, to launch a new website, more in keeping with today’s style of web design – more graphics, less boring text that no one will ever read, some interesting movement and (obviously) social media integration. I am sure you have found all of this already and I hope you like the way all of this works here.

You may ask “Why it took you so long to lauch a new website if you are a web designer?” – the answer is simple. I have been busy working on my clients’ projects and I appreciate they chose me as their designer.  It would not be without my clients where I am here today. Thank you and talk to you soon.

Please feel free to comment the new website under this post.