PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

On 2004-03-20 09:37, Spirit wrote:
I saw the same thing for years in print design. Let's say a page layout artist had to incorporate 500 words in a features page design. Left to themselves many artists will treat the text merely as an area of speckly black stuff they have to fit in somehow around their pretty graphics. They didn't actually care too much about readability or a heirachy of information.

FUNNY!!!

In the same way I think the problem with Flash is that a lot of it is design driven rather than information driven.

Exactly. And it also became something that people decided you 'had to have' for many people who still didn't quite get that there was more to the 'internet' than the 'www' acting as a giant advertisement to drive customers directly to a company's net profits.

But in none of this do I see any reason to criticise the program that allowed it to be created.

Well then, my apologies for the lack of definition in my statement.
By saying 'flash' I was not intending to COMPLETELY blame the application (as in 'Flash.exe') as I was referring to 'flash' as a whole, the application and flash creations out there on the web for browsing. I agree with your previous statement in that Flash is a tool that was initially intended specifically for time-line based animation with only the most rudimentary programatic control.

And establishing any sort of UI standard would be pointless imho. It may help beginners by leading them toward using standard components, but that's just trainer-wheel stuff.

Again, it's 100% up to personal skill.

Enjoyable debate

Now this part I don't totally agree with, although yes I am enjoying the discussion
There's been much debate about the use & abuse of the freedom of Flash GUI design in the Flash forums & newsgroups since Macromedia's purchase of flash in the 'early days' up through the modern version which have quite advanced scripting abilities. The same goes for Flash's integration into the world of communicating between programs and other machines. Macromedia itself has developed the application along these lines, although as you say the design side is very trainer-wheel. About all they've done for UI elements is develop 'Screens' ato expand the application beyond just the timeline based animation. Screens also give you access to 'forms' and 'slides' as a method of animation and hence navigation, with the most rudumentary graphical objects.

However this is much the same as html providing basic link & form funtionality etc. Nowhere did the web agree upon the top & side nav community standards that are followed by so many sites (especially of the conservative/corporate type) yet the vast majority of html sites adhere to this to greater & lesser degree. Yet the design roots of Flash remain strong to this day as you've said...

Oddly enough what I do for a living is exactly design, and I prefer this over the more 'conservative' strict programatic & pragmatic work that's out there. This means that I'm one of the MORE likely candidates to be doing worthless time consuming bandwidth wasting flash that is more substance than content. This is precisely why I'm so aware of the prevelance of the problem. Hard to admit I'm doing such black arts, but I in fact have 2 such projects underway right now...



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2004-03-20 14:45 ]</font>