Flash has caused me a huge amount of hassle in the last few months. When I first powered it up on the Macs at uni, I found the program completely un-intuitive. Nothing seemed to make sense, despite the vaguely familiar Powerpoint-esque features like grouping objects and the slight hint of graphics programs like Photoshop and Fireworks.
I realised I also had a residual amount of scorn for Flash. I associated it with ads, annoying over-designed sites – basically stuff that kept you away from the content of a site rather than anything you would actually visit a site to access.
I made my ball bounce in class with help from Dean and that made me start to be aware of the possibilities.
I work for a green organisation, the Australian Conservation Foundation. We have a joke at work that when we don’t know what to do, the management always asks “Well what is Greenpeace doing?” The answer to that question is, using Flash in a low key way to draw your eye away from the static central content of their homepage and towards little ads associated with campaigns in the side bar of their site.
I started to see how this could work for our site, which has always been way too static on the homepage. That led me to make some rash promises. “Sure, I’ll design some banner ads for our site!” I told everyone. “I’m learning Flash at uni.”
The first banner ad took me a week to produce (in between obviously doing the other stuff I need to do at work). I had hassles with ordering events, preventing endless looping, making links work, getting the format right to be uploaded onto the site.
And it wasn’t a very ambititous banner either, basically just some text fading in and a link through to the appropriate page. Fortunately the IT guy at work just happened to buy us Flash recently as part of a software package so I had the software in PC version at work so I could muck around with it whenever there was a pause. But there were a few late nights and frantic phone calls to various IT types before this rather average banner made it onto the site.
The next time I ended up designing a banner was by accident. A passing head honcho had asked me to make these pages to celebrate our 40th anniversary and the hassle of trying to stretch my skills to make the video stuff had meant I was very pressed for time. When I finally got them up, she happened to mention that a Flash banner that pointed to them ‘would be nice.’ I was basically too wussy to say “No way, I’m crap at Flash and I haven’t got time.” so I faced the prospect of having to create another banner.
But this time things were much easier. I had solved most of the issues I had had with the simple stuff like looping, linking and getting the file type right. I even managed to add some layers with more interesting stuff happening, like these balloons that rise in the background. Very nifty! Here is the second banner.
However this banner still has some problems. I realised after I uploaded it that it lacks any “click here” or “do this action” type information to let the user know that clicking the banner will take them anywhere. I’m too lazy to think of a way to fix this issue so I’m going to let it stand, but I’ll have to take that into account next time.
This raises an interesting point about interactivity, which is that I can’t assume that everyone who comes to my site has the same ‘literacy’ in interactivity that I do. I would assume that if i saw something done in Flash moving on a site, there’s a good chance I could click through it to something else. But a lot of people complain to me that it isn’t clear certain things lead to other things.
