This Sunday, I’ll list my 10 favourite websites of the week.
They may include articles, video and portfolios.
Let’s start.

• Most Comprehensive is Your Rights as a Photographer by Tutorial9.net: a complete and extensive guide about commercial and legal rights when you use your fotocamera, there also are two downloadable samples of models releases;

• Most Creative is A little something to remind me… by CR Blog that shows how photographer Michael Hughes renew the concept of tourist attractions in his new book Souvenirs, where he take a shot of a postcard of them, skillfully merged with the real view;

• Most Outrageous is Shavethepussy.com. Yes, as the name says, you have all the tools to shave a pussy and get a score to win the foam/moisturizer set. Honestly, I didn’t understand if this site was made to really promote the set or the amazing mastery of the flash design, but one thing for sure it gets noticed!!;

• Most Funny is Make my logo bigger video on YouTube. How often customers obstruct us from doing our work with request of the kind: “I want my logo bigger”, “All of that white space is wasted”, “I want more colors”?. Well, it has been created a new set of tools right for this purpose.

• Most Useful is How to Write An Effective Design Brief By JCD Blog. Starting from the definition of design brief itself it analyzes what goals of design could be, then it draws a roadmap through target market, design specifications, benchmark and deadline.

• Most Interesting is Typographic Nostalgia: Bell Centennial by Speak Up. This article talks of the creation of the typeface Bell Centennial, used for the AT&T telephone book, as an update of old Bell Gothic. A lot of good pics of the rare booklet that illustrate the process.

• Most Beautiful is The beauty of old maps by Design Daily. I just love vintage photos and illustrations. Period.

• Most Valuable is 10 Timeless Business Tips From 10 Millionaires by Quick Sprout. From venture capital to savings, from starting a business to investing in ourselves.

• My favourite portfolio: Philipp Zurmoehle at http://www.phillennium.com/ is a fine and creative graphic and web designer from Norway.

Strolling around on the web I’ve found a post of Rob McQueen that, opening the post with the quote in subject, taken from DesignCharts.com (a website that weekly publish the chart of the “coolest” designs of their network), wonders how much of this is is true, stating that now Flash websites are the new standard and since it is finally indexed by search engines the boring era of the html dinosaur is over.

Ahem…

Well…It could be that I’m a dinosaur myself, so I’m scared of exctinction, or it could be that some “webdez” feels too much like rockstars…or just both of two, but I STRONGLY disagree with this point of view!!

I don’t think that Flash could be for the moment (Never say never! the net is too much everchanging!) an absolute standard. It is the only choice for rich, visually and entertaining websites, but if you need an informational website/portal you still need to rely in old good html/xhtml.
Informational websites must stay up-to-date often and with flash to perform an update it is a too much a complicate and time waster task.
IMHO, it has become more a standard, nowadays, the transformation of a personal website in a business blog.
We can see more and more of it each day. A lot of webdesigners that yesterday had a flash website, today open a blog. This is the tendence my eyes are seeing!
With an informational blog you can show better to a possible customer who you are and your expertise.
You can share your thoughts. You can network more.

I simply think Flash and html/xhtml just take different roads, serve different purposes (which doesn’t mean they can’t proficiently work together as well).

And to be honest, it’s not that I have seen so much “flashed” website on top of search engines, in spite of the so much talked about new .swf seachability (that now is not new anymore) I’m still seeing what Rob calls “crappy regular sites”.
God knows why! (Yeah, I’m ironic…)