My love letter to Adobe Flash
How Flash changed my life and what it has taught me about the future.
For those of us who came of age in the Dot Com Boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s, Flash was one of the most creatively liberating web technologies to ever come along. Before the adoption of the Flash Plugin, the web did not have a reliable way for people to experience sound or animation online and designers were limited to making still images and primitive animated gifs to express themselves.
For me, Flash was the equivalent of going from morse code to having color television overnight and as a designer, it opened up new creative possibilities unlike any other era of the web. In the last decade, the maturation of HTML5 and responsive design along with the hegemonic nature of social media has made Flash a relic of a bygone era.
As of January 2021, Adobe is no longer supporting Flash and much of the richness that Flash fostered will become ephemeral memories forever locked up in dusty Zip Disks, Jaz Drives, and CDRs to be lost to digital obsolescence. I am not a nostalgic person by nature but I do know that Flash had a huge impact on a lot of people, including me, and was the quintessential definition of what progressive web experiences were for a brief and exciting period of time in the later ’90s and early aughts.
As a democratizing force that brought designers and technologists together on equal footing as a digital medium, Flash helped establish one of the first genuinely global creative communities on the web. Before we all forget, I want to capture some of the larger themes for why Flash was so meaningful to web history and what we might learn from it to inform our future.
This is my Love Letter to Flash.
The Web Wild West
It’s late 1996 and I am sitting at my desk on the 4th floor near Broadway and Houston at my first Dot Com job. About 20 young people under the age of 25 are on Mac 7500’s cranking out PSDs and largely static HTML. Between lunches at Two Boots or Kelli & Ping and late-night Duke Nukem network kill sessions we were working tirelessly to try to make cool stuff on the web. It was hard back then. As our twenty-something bosses were promising the world of opportunity that the web had to offer to hungry clients, our fledgling design team was limited to background images, 72dpi, and elaborate animated gifs to “sell the dream.”
One of our extremely smart and talented developers emailed me a link to a piece of software called FutureSplash Animator and said; “the design team should totally check this out.” The trial was free and unlike a lot of web stuff it worked on a Mac. Having worked a little bit in Macromedia Director, I was familiar with using a timeline, ‘sprites’, and triggering interactions through simple scripts. Within a few hours of playing around with FutureSplash, I was able to make a little animation, add an image or two, export, embed and ftp it up to my personal web hosting. I emailed the link to my developer buddy and said “check it.” “So Rad!” was his answer. That was all the confirmation I needed. I was hooked.
Within a few months, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia, who rebranded it Macromedia Flash. Flash was later acquired by Adobe in 2005. By early 1997, designers began to quickly adopt Flash because you could integrate text, data, vector graphics, raster graphics and sound all in one platform. At the time Flash single-handedly took the web from a largely static and crude experience to something that was bright, shiny and sexy. The web was forever transformed and designers became very stoked.
Building a community through happy accidents
The barrier to entry to learn the basics of Flash of was extremely low. The real secret to unlocking Flash for me was realizing Flash was not a design tool, it was an ‘assembly tool.’ Everything I created in Flash was designed in Illustrator or Photoshop first. It had to be because you could work out your designs using the tools a designer used most. Once you had the design down, you could then label and layer your files and import these in to make corresponding symbols in Flash. This is very similar to importing layers in Illustrator to a composition in After Effects. Once you have your symbols, you could then animate them and add ActionScript to trigger the timeline or trigger any animations within the timeline.
Because Flash allowed you to quickly and easily import layered designs as symbols and then begin to add keyframes and ActionScript to make things animate and be interactive, the speed with which you could build, export, and post embedded SWF files made getting high fidelity interactive designs online very fast. This speed allowed me and thousands of other young designers to experiment and iterate. As I started publishing my experiments under volumeone.com I was able to get very weird and novel ideas out in the world faster than I was ever able to do before in any medium. 25 years later we forget how truly groundbreaking Flash was in accelerating the ability to get your design work out in the world at the time. Before Flash we just had the hope of getting your work in a book or magazine if you mailed it in as a print or a physical slide.
As designers and technologists played around with Flash during the late ’90s to the early 2000s, its ease of use and immediate feedback created a ‘web design scene’ that never existed before. The rapid ability to explore, iterate and share was the jet fuel for a new crop of designers that used the web as their playground and I was honored to meet and hang out with many of them. Joshua Davis lived down the street from me in Williamsburg and became one of the first Flash ‘web celebs’ I ever met. I also became friends with Michael Young who was doing really amazing things incorporating 3D and Flash that I still consider groundbreaking along with international friends like Nico Stumpo who was pushing the boundaries of Flash and character animation.
There are so many other designers that I admire and was inspired by from the Flash era like GMUNK and many others. As Flash helped the web design scene skyrocket, design magazine platforms like Design Is Kinky and QBN were launched and gave designers singular destinations to find out about new artists.
Design conferences like OFFF and Semipermanent promoted web designers alongside street and multimedia artists while magazines like IdN gave us printed publications to call our own. In just a few years Flash helped create a rich global network of web talent that were all truly connected, encouraging and supportive. Looking back I realize now that like punk rock, underground comics or electronic music, we had created our own design ‘subculture’ that formed a complex tapestry of inspiration, work and excitement. Those maturing days of Flash in the early 2000’s were a special time for me and many others not only because everything was new but because you knew you were not alone. You had a really international community you were a part of.
From Playground to Professionalism
Inevitably clients began to take notice of Flash and what was a fledgling technology became the backbone for countless websites and advertising campaigns. In the early and mid 2000’s I ended up doing an enormous amount of client work using Flash. Much of that work came to me because I had my own experimental work out in the world and had spoken at conferences and I had been published. By picking up Flash early and by building a body of work on my own, clients took notice and I somehow got work. As the first Dot Com bubble burst I was on the ascent and managed to start a small studio and do some interesting things.
Of all of the Flash based client work I did, there are only a handful that I feel were good. Working on the Nike Whatever campaign and a Nike Training Ball that came with a playable CDR were cool because I got to work with a really big brand and got to go deep into the Nike world. As a young designer, being able to go on a commercial shoot in multiple locations and hob knob with people at the Nike campus was a dream come true. Messing around in Flash for a few years and making fun and weird stuff somehow gave me a seat at the table in the commercial world. I felt like the kid that snuck into the rock show without paying and I was honored to be able to briefly work on stuff for Nike.
Art Director: Andy Fackrell. I got to design and build the Flash site for the campainn along with a custom skin for the Quicktime Player.
By the mid 2000’s I was doing more polished and more difficult client projects in Flash. Ones that stand out are Flash sites for new Sony products, the first Adidas Skateboarding site and a site for Gatorade featuring the Nascar In-Car Drinking System. These projects were very graphics heavy, complex and difficult to maintain.
I used lots of PNG sequences and SWFs inside of other SWFs. These sites looked cool but they were tough to create and incredibly hand-made. For Adidas I had to cut out countless shoes in Photoshop, make them pngs to trigger different views. I used ActionScript to make animations more slick, doing away with traditional tweening in Flash so that everything looked smoother. For the Gatorade site I ended up building a 3D model of a real race car and mapped realistic graphics onto it so that I could rotate it in 360 degrees and call out each area of the system.
Clients, especially advertising agencies, started to believe that Flash could do anything and this pressure made everything less fun. What started out as an experimental playground became difficult commercial work. As Flash moved from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0, it became more powerful but also harder for a designer like me to keep up. By 2007 or so Flash had lost its luster for me. I started to feel like I had to do Flash work while I no longer had the desire to do it for myself. I did my last client project in Flash in 2008 and my last personal project in 2009. I had gotten all I wanted out of Flash as a medium and I became more interested in custom typography, lettering, motion and 3D. As much as Flash had liberated me in some ways, using it so much for so many years also burned me out on it.
What Flash Taught Me
The culture of experimentation and inclusion that Flash helped facilitate not only inspired me but also made me unafraid to learn new software and explore new things as my interest in design and form making evolved. I still hold these values because of what Flash helped me see and it has made me a stronger and more curious designer as a result.
I have also learned that you can’t do it alone. You need other people to be your cheerleader, give you encouragement and push you creatively. More than anything Flash was a creative catalyst at a time and a place in the evolution of the web where we all really needed it. Flash was as much a creative tool as it was a new way of working and thinking about making. It helped take design out of the darkness of the primitive web into the light of the present and for that I am grateful.
The biggest lesson I learned through all of my work during the Flash era is don’t take your work for granted. Things change and you must roll with it. In the last decade smartphones and social media have eclipsed the previous era of the web and Flash along with it. I am sure as the web evolves into a new era other technologies will supplant our current time and that is a good thing. Like microprocessors, we too will advance, evolve and improve. Regardless of the tools we use, experimentation, building community, sharing and making happy accidents are universal pursuits and Flash helped me realize this.
Thank you Flash. You will be dearly missed.
Thanks.
I would like to thank Jonathan Gay, Robert Tatsumi, Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh for inventing FutureSplash back in 1996. You had no idea how many lives you would change. I would also like to thank every designer that saw my Flash stuff, was into it, remember it, and shoot me the occasional email. I would also like to thank the SF MOMA for taking my Flash work and putting it in their collection. For everyone out there that I met at a lecture, party or conference back in the day because of my Flash work, I am giving you a big hug right now. Thank you!
Thanks for reading. If you are interested, check out my book A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity and the Business of Design.
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