19 Excellent Flash Designing's

With Flash you can do more than just displaying videos. You can create stunning visual experience and offer your visitors incredible user interaction. Although Flash is definitely not the favourite medium for usability and accessibility advocates, it has its advantages and it empowers the Web with functionalities which make it an incredibly interactive medium. With Flash designers can achieve results which simply aren’t possible with (X)HTML and CSS.

The results can be creative, impressive, beautiful and fascinating. Under two conditions: 1) if designers find the right mixture between graphics, animation, video and sound and 2) if designers follow the guidelines of usability and user interaction.

However, since there is a number of things that can go wrong in Flash, it’s easy to get it wrong. In fact, there are thousands of examples where it is the case. In Flash any experiments with navigation and layouts are possible and in most cases it’s extremely hard to find a creative yet intuitive approach. Flash is commonly used by designers, agencies, advertisers and interactive web sites, and not on the sites where simplicity and quick access to information are important.

In this post we present 19 examples of outstanding Flash designs with excellent use of graphics, visual elements, interface design and graphics motion. This showcase (mostly) presents “pure” web designs; we’ve tried to avoid Flash-based games and advertising.

Mistake #1: Use Of Flash To Imitate (X)HTML/CSS

Flash shouldn’t be used if the designer tries to imitate (X)HTML/CSS-presentation. Long texts shouldn’t be embedded in Flash movies, because it’s harder (if possible at all) to work with the embedded text once you need to. Cubamoon is a perfect example of how this is done wrongly. The completeness of the design is enviable, its beauty irresistible, Flash-effects are stunning. However it’s really hard to work with the content of the site. Visitors can’t open links in new windows and the text can’t be selected and copied.

Flash’s strength lies in its ability to showcase unusual visual solutions, including graphic motion, videos and sound. Make use of them if you really want to achieve a stunning visual design, instead of imitating “conventional” web-presentation.

Mistake #2: Navigation Is Unintuitive

Whatever decisions developers make for the design of their navigation menus, the result has to fulfill three significant requirements: it has to be intuitive, easy-to-use and work properly. Whether the design is Flash-based or not is not that important.

The navigation is possible with the wheel which needs to be dragged. That looks easy, but it isn’t. Where is the grey zone between usability and creativity?

Using too creative approaches designers risk to confuse or even disturb visitors. The freedom for experiments with Flash may lead to unusual solutions which aren’t necessarily understood by all visitors.

Therefore designing in Flash never assume that the navigation can be arbitrarily complex and that visitors will take time to explore it. Users don’t like to wait. And if they don’t understand how the site works they leave. This is simple. And may cost you your money and your efforts. Be willing to compromise. Use creative approaches, but always take your visitors into consideration.