Update: John Nack of Adobe posts on his blog, strongly refuting the claim.

Since Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, showing quite blatantly that it didn’t support Flash, the backlash has been severe. Lots of (frankly stupid) journos have blathered on about how no Flash spells doom for Apple’s device, forgetting that people don’t care about technology—they just care about what you can do with it. In other words, Flash isn’t important, but the things you can do with it are. Flash is mostly used for games, ads, video and overblown interactive websites. Right now, popular Flash-originated games already exist on the App Store (often for free), everyone hates ads, video services are transitioning to open standards and overblown interfaces can go die in a fire.

But despite what some claim, Apple’s rather brutal stance as far as the web goes isn’t to block competition, but to push open standards, rather than proprietary ones. People forget that Flash isn’t open—it’s just very popular. Somehow, even many geeks are OK with this, despite the fact they rallied against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for being in much the same position fairly recently.

Perhaps the difference in reaction to Microsoft and Adobe was down to the former’s appalling business practices, using its ‘unfair’ advantage to bully the competition into submission. Sadly, it appears Adobe’s now overstepped this mark. Various sources reported yesterday that Adobe has blocked the latest publication of HTML5 (AppleInsider), the standard that could knock Flash down a peg or 20.

This revelation comes off the back of months of regular comments from Adobe about the importance of supporting open standards. Nonetheless, if there’s any truth to the linked article (and similar ones doing the rounds) it appears Adobe’s narked about the ‘canvas’ element in HTML5, which is a direct threat to Flash. What Adobe should do is start work on some amazing authoring tools to create content for HTML5, rather than trying to slow its ascent and keep Flash in the spotlight for longer. As Microsoft will tell you, a company can only hold back the tide for so long, and the tech community holds grudges for many years.

Adam Banks on Flash:

Flash is a technology that emerged from 1990s multimedia and appeals to developers, especially developers who aren’t really developers and are hoping they can get away with it.

I’m going to be smiling for the rest of the day now.

About a week ago, a design acquaintance of mine mentioned Clients From Hell on Twitter. Although I consider myself very lucky on balance, with the vast majority of my clients being great, everyone in the industry has horror stories to tell. Clients From Hell is a place for anonymous contributions, and had me transfixed and also laughing at stories that mirrored some of my own experiences: clients who think that because they could really do something themselves, they shouldn’t have to pay you to do it for them; people who want you to design something despite not being able to supply any kind of brief; unrealistic businesspeople who want the moon on a stick for next to nothing.

But having followed this blog for a few days via RSS, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with it. Horror stories are all very well, but I’m under the impression that some of these clients from hell have had the misfortune to deal with designers from hell.

Part of the problem of the blog is that there’s no context. So while it’s amusing to laugh at the ‘stupid client’ who said “the unicorns don’t look realistic enough”, that statement could make perfect sense. Unicorns are fictional, but they’re basically horses with a horn. Was the response to the unicorns in the design simply down to them not looking like horses? If so, that’s pretty efficient criticism from the client, not something to joke about.

Elsewhere, design snobbery is rife on the blog, and that’s quite depressing. If anything, it shows how many designers take their knowledge for granted and don’t take the time to explain the obvious to clients (or at least ensure they understand certain things). There are several posts ridiculing clients who respond to ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text negatively, but outside of the design world, who knows what this is? If you don’t make your clients aware that the text in mock-up designs is gobbledygook, how are they to know something hasn’t gone wrong?

And so it goes: a client wants a “darker black”, which is something almost everyone in the print industry must have said to printers at some point; another can’t find the shade of blue they want in the Photoshop colour picker—a hugely complex visual device for someone who’s not used it before; someone asks a designer to innovate by adding Flash animation to an email newsletter—not an outlandish request for someone not involved in web technology on a day-to-day basis; a banner is measured on-screen by someone else, which makes perfect sense if you’ve never worked with pixels in a design package; and one comment is from a client saying an iStockPhoto watermark doesn’t add anything visually, but were they informed that stock images, until purchased, are watermarked?

A designer’s job isn’t just to design—it’s to communicate. But this doesn’t just mean communicating the client’s message to an audience—you must also communicate with your client, and ensure they understand what you’re doing and what’s technically feasible. Laughing at someone who doesn’t share your technical knowledge doesn’t make you a great designer—in fact, it rather makes you the opposite.