Welcome
Flash - Idea Driven Environment
Hello!
This course will introduce you to the one of the most exciting yet easy to use software application for Web design and authoring - Macromedia Flash.
Flash environment gains a tremendous popularity among professional and amateur designers because of it’s intuitive interface, opportunities for creativity, productive output with minimum learning.
Designers who started to work with first versions of Flash could feel a great relief when changing there often awkward scripting techniques in the attempt to make their interface animated. Where JavaScript demands of long and precise coding, Flash uses simple dragging and clicking procedures and compile a very short and efficient code.
I call Flash “Idea driven environment”. The meaning of those words is - most of the goals Flash can achieve also may be accomplished with other software applications. However, implementation of those goals with other techniques is often “heavyweight”, vulnerable and demands a lot of practice. Therefore in many situation designers, especially novice had an idea, a wish, they could see their Web page presented and interacting with user in original unusual fashion… but abandoned their ideas because of the difficult and timely implementation process. I remember how I, then junior designer, spent a whole day trying to manually code moderately complex animation on the HTML page and as a result produced a bulky code which took a lot of video card resources and doesn’t work well on some browsers. With Flash I could achieve the same goal in several minutes and with better result.
With Flash the process of implementation is much more friendly and when one have spent couple days studying the first morsels can be done and incorporated to the real-life site. Many people have created professional, market-ready, competitive Web sites based on Flash techniques after several seminars and practical exercises.
So… go ahead, if you have an idea, for sure you will have now the tools to make it work!
An example above is done in Flash. It uses vectorized custom fonts, which were animated. The object takes only 6 kilobytes to download. Click it to stop.