Starting as a Newbie Flash Designer Now Would Be Daunting
When I started using Flash at version 3, I was inspired by GaboCorp and Eye4U, as I am sure many of you were. The tool at that time was relatively simplistic, pretty much all nested timelines and other symbols (remember using buttons and graphic symbols?) with only a smattering of actions available compared to it’s big brother, Director. The actual sites/designs coming out were able to be counted as they occurred, with server side interaction only a gleam in some engineer’s eye. You could see the site, emulate the visual effect with the drawing tools in the IDE and put out a nice SWF that put you in the game after going through the tutorials (Remember the skywriting airplane? if you do, comment on this story, please!) and a having a bit of design talent.
Flash 4 came out and the tool matured, though really only marginally. The barrier to entry for new designers was a few weekends behind a closed door and some determination.
When Flash 5 hit the streets, the dot syntax was liberating (no more “/:” woohoo!) and the buzz could easily be seen in the amazing new work being put out by Yugo P, Hillman Curtis and Joshua Davis to name just a few. The createEmptyMovieClip/attachMovieClip, rudimentary drawing API and and a few other niceties like primitive html support allowed PHP/MySQL Flash sites to spring up like daisies and we were off.
Flash forward to today and man, things are nuts… AS3.0 is rapidly becoming the norm for high-end effects and application development, and me, being a bit old school (I really only recently started using the Flash 8 filters in billable work), I just can’t imagine what it must feel like for new designers entering this arena. Hardly an experience site or app out there today doesn’t have programmatic animation, XML to the gills and a hearty amount of server side interaction along with some hot shot 3rd party API.
I teach university students (currently HTML/CSS but sometimes Flash), and it’s tough to even know where to start out… a semester or so with the timeline, another with some simple AS1.0/2.0 stuff and then it’s off to the races. What was their normal way to set up a movie, (nested timelines and tons of stop(), gotoAndPlay() commands everywhere) is soon taught to them that it isn’t really the best way to apporach things. Externalized libraries, animating with MCTween, LacoTween or Fuse, XML, etc. are the way to go if you want to produce pro level work. When you then point them to OSFlash and the stuff that people are doing with MTASC and FlashDevelop, Se|Py and all the rest, their minds just get blown.
The students seemingly get things quickly, but the time that I have behind the wheel has been invaluable to me… I just don’t know if I would be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed if I knew, that in order to be a Flash ninja today, you basically have to live eat and breathe OOP and MVC, use third party compilers and get ready to code like Neo or whip crazy timelines like nobody’s business.
Of course, yes, there is young talent out there, but that bar is excruciatingly high… Anyone else out there feeling this same way?
Posted on March 25, 2007
Martin Mar 25
I was thinking exactly that about 4-5 years ago when we were on Flash 7 (I forget exactly when) and we were given the task of teaching flash to new graduate designers. There’s still an open door to Flash if the timeline and animation is your thing. But you show them the timeline, movieclips, gotoAndStop knowing full well it’s effectively useless. Then you show them it’s pretty much Java these days and hey, you’ve been selling to the wrong group. The gap has definately been getting wider since.
There are still places for a good timeline animator, we all know that traditional skills have a place. But to be honest, I haven’t seen a Flash job without AS2, OOP and Design Patterns as a basic skill set in ages.
It would seem that Flash has left the arts and joined the sciences.
Chad Mar 25
Martin,
Thanks for the comment. I know there has to be others out there thinking the same thing… AS3 is cool and all, but ooh boy, is it ever a long way from Joe Cartoon and Praystation.
Intoxo Po Mar 25
Couldn’t agree more. I count myself as lucky for having been almost fooled into learning programming by being spoon-feed one chunk at a time. I probably would have been overwhelmed all those years ago if flash looked at all the way it does now. And yes, I remember the skywriting airplane. Do you remember the animated crawling baby example from even earlier?
Casey Mar 26
I definitely agree. I have friends who are just getting into flash and they’re heavy on the timeline. They have the idea of what they want to do and don’t understand that its just not possible to do without a hefty amount of actionscript. Hell, I’m still not quite confident enough in OOP. I mean I can see others oop applications and implement/tweak/understand them, but I have a much harder time understanding how to take my idea and put it in OOP terms. Flash is getting to the point where its going to be a Comp Sci major’s work and a designer would just be baffled. I’m glad that I enjoy the geeky tech side of things as well as the design. I can only hope that there are enough of us out there to be able to handle both.
100% tech people usually don’t have a grasp on how to handle motion graphics properly even with the strict supervision of a designer. And then if the designer doesn’t know the tech side, they can’t very well explain what they want to the tech guy. I see a future of a studios being a few tech guys and a few design guys. The design guys have meetings with the tech guys where they are flailing their arms around the air at varied speeds trying to explain how they want each piece of the site to move. And to top off this crazy awkward time for everyone, Flash jobs seem to be posted about hourly on legit design job sites. Crazy high demand for flash these days.
Casey Mar 26
Oh, and I’m 22 (not sure if that’s considered “the young and upcoming crowd”). I graduate in the spring and I got started with Flash 4. I can’t imagine how lost I’d be if I hadn’t dove in long ago. Hah I think it was just last year that I finally threw my flash 4 & 5 books a away.
dinfluxEd Jan 8
yes! i completely agree. I’m completely lost with flash, I picked up other things first and now I feel like my lack of flash knowledge is really hindering my chances of successful web design. thankfully i am focusing more on motion graphics/film, but sometimes tempting freelance web projects come around that i wish i knew flash for. Oh well i guess we all have to specialize