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With Flash now well and truly dead, almost a decade's worth of archived work has suddenly become obsolete. Good thing I always had the habit of cataloguing projects through screenshots. A Sunday Flash thread:
My first site, ximeraLabs, launched in 2001 during the first public May 1 Reboot initiative. Like many sites of that time it was a Flash-fuelled place to experiment with design and interaction. Never mind that it didn't make sense.
I put everything I learned building my own site into arguably the project that catapulted me into the comic book industry: the website for artist Ashley Wood — iFrames, 65FPS pixelstretch animations glitchy graphics set the standard of my approach to design and comics.
I would end up designing around half a dozen sites with Ashley Wood; the last major one would be this full Flash site for Plan B Science & Entertainment, which was kind of a collective name for our collaborative work.
Over the years Flash never featured heavily in my client & agency work. At Kleber we were pretty much a front runner in many ways for pure HTML/CSS driven sites, but occasionally we'd leverage Flash for immersive content or rich navigation and music components.
Arguably the last full Flash-driven sites I worked on, with Glass Eye, where the official SUPER 8 site which allowed you to explore the lead character's desk; and a Mission: Impossible 4 game. There were a few others; but in my mind 2011 was pretty much the end of using Flash.
The one that got away: I was approached by WIRED to design a Flash animated title screen for their first every iPad/Tablet edition, which was a big deal at the time. But then Apple blocked Flash on their devices, and the project never happened.
Beyond excessive frame animations and the odd Flashkit ActionScript download I was never a Flash power user. It served me well for a good amount of time; but I've always loved the minimal quality of CSS driven sites. Onwards!
