Interactive Design v1 - The Role Of Flash

Now I know what your thinking what do I care about interactive designers and what makes them work, you maybe that graphic designer that see's us as the devil who is trying to kill your field of work, with there flashy new style that has no place in there design world, well im hear to demystify that myth the best I can so lets start with the basic's


In the field of Interactive Design only one thing is more important than the mind and that is Adobe's Flash its our livelihood our bread and butter program it brings life to the experiences, dreams and passion's that we develop in our creative mess that we call our imaginations, so for all those graphic designers that are trying to find something to relate to it from there world think of it as our version of Indesign. Its the tool that we head to first thing after we concept an experience, now u can already see a trend im using the word "Experience" let me clarify why I focus on this word so much when im talking about interactive design, in interactive design everything is about the user's experience just how graphic design focuses on provoking a feeling we focus on dragging the user into a world and letting them interact with it, anyway back to Flash.

Flash as a program deals in adding animation, Video, Interactivity to Games, Web sites and advertisements, Its a Rich Internet Application (RIA). Flash's main purpose is to manipulate vector and raster images to provide animation to whatever text, drawings or images you want along with the ability to add video and sound as well this gives flash a highly creative field to play in and thats with out even going into the programs object orientated language Actionscript which il cover in detail in a later blog. So theres a good description of what flash is on a technical level, But I know there are some designers think and what was I supposed to be impressed was I supposed to see that same white light that all interactive designers see with that program because all I see is another program, its not like I ever use flash in my daily life. Well let me make a assumption that the majority of the readers of this blog use Facebook the worlds largest social media network and il make another assumption that you play some form of gaming inside of Facebook well the base of all those programs is flash its the body the structure of those games, so even though you may say screw flash your promote the use of flash and you dont even know it.

But back to the way we interactive designers use flash and how it makes us soo amazing to this new ever changing world of design. To we the interactive creative Flash is a enabler for us to express our creativeness, so for example im working for a client who has a business in the sports promotion, now the way a graphic design would approach creating something is to jump on indesign and photoshop and make something static that communicates and emotion, but the way an interactive design would approach this is to jump and on flash and think well I can create a flash animated banner or a small flash game promoting the event or he/she could go all out and create a flash user interface in which anyone interested can interact in a completely individual way maybe he wants to watch some promos of the event or wants to see the profiles of the teams playing or he wants up to date info on the event, well all that can be achieved inside of the realms of flash.

So in summary flash is the a enabler to all interactive designers its no black magic its a tool waiting for someone to explore its possibilities, it's constantly evolving re-shaping its self for something so fantastic and revolutionary every time we enter its realm.

References

Adobe Flash Professional Cs5. (2010). Retrieved May 17, 2010, from

http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/

Unofficial Adobe Cs5 Blog. (2010). Retrieved May 17, 2010, from

http://cs5.org/?cat=8

Ten Usability Heuristics. (2005). Retrieved May 19, 2010, from

http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

Interaction Design. (2008). Retrieved May 19, 2010, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design

Interaction Design Blog. (2009). Retrieved May 19, 2010, from
http://www.interactiondesignblog.com/

Develop Php.(2008). Retrieved May 18, 2010, from

http://www.developphp.com/