One big thing I have always hated is the inability to natively bring in a layered PSD as a series of keyframes or layers. I’m sure others feel my pain. I know there are plugins or something like that. But I don’t think I’m going to buy to a plug-in for what should be a relatively trivial operation.

My usual workflow for this situation is to take the PSD, open it with Fireworks and then export to Flash. This works fairly well, but does mess up color modes from time to time and I have never been to successful with complex masks, etc. So in short, it’s okay, but not really… I hope that the CS3 suite goes a long ways towards fixing that. With Flash 8′s blend modes and filters I have to think the tools exist to make it work a bit better than Photoshop CS2 to Flash 8.

The workflow for Illustrator to Flash is really even worse. You have the option to export to SWF, but the quality of line it produces and the handling of colors and masks is atrocious. You can then either export an older version of EPS or AI and take your chances that the features you used are supported in that file format. The real kicker IMHO is that because you have been teased with the tantalizing choices of keyframes or layers, you tell yourself, “Yes, this time! This is it! It is with this piece of art that I will finally get a nice looking SWF out of Illustrator!”… And then, all your gradients turn to bitmaps and your clipping masks become black squares… so you go back to Illustrator and make a PNG or take the clipping mask as a guide and recreate the art in Flash. And then you cry.

Too a certain extent this is all hyperbole, but you know, a truly round trip/enhanced workflow in these three tools will make my whole team a lot more productive. So, those of you in the know… any beans to spill? Will complex layered PSDs and Illustrator files live in harmony with the Flash timeline and the Flex Canvas?

I admit it. I was late to the game. I waited until 2002 to produce my first standards based/compliant website. It was a simple affair, consisting a couple divs sprinkled about and having a spartan layout compared to my rigorous slice and dice table based sites of yore. But, it was a step in the right direction. I had been fighting it big time… for a number of reasons.

1. It would take a massive relearning of what I had learned – Imageready 1.0 was a godsend and a curse all in one. The “save for web” slicing crack had taken hold of me and when I produced a pixel perfect layout with pristine text and fabulous rollovers (some even with animated gifs – ), I felt great immediately afterwards, with a sick, sinking feeling taking hold of me later after having a congratulatory beer and cigarette (I was a smoker then) knowing I wasn’t doing things the right way.
2. It would take a pile of new software on users machines – Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was great and a fantastic battle in the browser wars. For 3% of the audience or so. IE 5 on Windows was still in non-standards hell and Netscape was in purgatory. In short, even if you did produce a good site then, your chances of having someone actually see it as you intended was slim. Add to that a relatively low broadband penetration rate until recently and you have an even slimmer chance, because non one is getting the new browser because it takes far to long to download.
3. Working your clients through a design process that by its very nature infers some variance from the final product is very difficult - Some clients are just not able to accept that “YMMV” or it might look a bit different on another machine. After all, they probably just came from a Photoshop sliced site that looks picture perfect from the outside but is 99% obsolete on the inside (Here’s looking at you Jeffrey Zeldman).

When the dotcom bubble burst, I got laid off after 2 corporate buyouts. I freelanced when I could, all the whiel seeking fulltime jobs at firms that probably didn’t need me or couldn’t see the need for a senior level web designer. I began to seek ways to differentiate myself and stay with the curve of the industry. I started reading some blogs and saw the writing on the wall. Adapt or join the ranks fo basement dwelling Frontpage users.

Since then, I have largely produced only CSS based sites or 100% Flash based minisites. I primarily use XHTML and am now liberally sprinkling in some AJAX-y DHTML type stuff using frameworks. By and large, I have sipped from the standards firehouse in huge gasping gulps. After much kicking and screaming, I was/am a bit a of a standardista. A pretty flexible one, but one that sees the value in separating content from presentation, anyway.

While the skills are there, and the browsers are there, mostly, too… But one thing still hasn’t really changed on the client front. Pixel perfect website designs are definitely still in vogue. We designers and developers are in the thick of this. We create a dozen sites a year, maybe more. We track the trends, see what others are doing across the entire web, not just a narrow industry like finance, or manufacturing, or consumer goods… In short, we’re desensitized. Jaded. Able to see what happens when the content becomes 5 paragraphs instead of 2. When 3 new nav items get added. When a section gets moved to be a subsection in another area of the site. Not so with the client. They get a new site every 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. They don’t know Digg, AJAX or Flex and they don’t care. They want their headers as Eurostile with a dropshadow and thats what they want (Yes, I know about SiFR and Siir, etc). Period.

While talking to your clients about standards and maintainability, etc. things look like they might be sticking. Then, they see your first HTML page after having only seen mockups in Photoshop and the headers have shifted three pixels over, and they are freaking. What now? How to get them to see the light? I have no conclusions here, and some clients are certainly exceptions to the rule, but in my experience, even with a very trained and experienced designer these sorts of baubles occur.

How do you iron this out? I know many of you might say… ‘don’t matter to me, I design experience sites in Flash’.