FLASH DESIGN

Flash design is a niche in internet design that has exploded over the last few years. Connections have speeded up to tens of hundreds of times what they were five years ago, hence use of Flash has grown exponentially. Animations which would earlier take minutes to open, open almost simultaneously along with the site.

Flash is a relatively simple to use program that allows you to make simple as well as complex animations for use on the web. But before you start integrating these animations on your website, you need to actually learn how to make one. I can’t really teach you exactly how to create flash animations, right down to the technicalities of it, so I am assuming you have a decent knowledge of Flash and just need a few pushes and prods on your way to a better Flash design.

Watch Flash videos by the best in the business and see how they do it. There are thousands of free videos out there that teach you specific techniques in Flash which will really jazz up your application. Such videos can be found on sites like youtube literally by the tens of thousands and you’ll never run out of new stuff to learn.

You should also ensure that the flash content you make must run on all kinds of platforms. This means your flash content should not require a high end PC to be displayed properly. It should run on old, low memory PC’s without any hiccups. The basic reasoning behind this is that a lot of traffic these days is from third world countries like India and China where the hardware may not be the best. You should have a sufficiently high frame rate, but nothing so fast so as to increase the file size dramatically an/or take a lot of processing power. Nobody likes to wait for 5 minutes for the site to load completely.

Lastly, make sure what you create is pleasing to look at. Avoid excessive use of graphics and use graphics to supplement your content, don’t make it the main focus. Be original in your layout and use of colour schemes. People should remember your site even after they leave it, your design shouldn’t be a carbon copy of another good looking site you found on the net. Use subtle colours that don’t hurt the eye and keep it simple. Most importantly, put yourself in the visitors shoes, would you like to see what is on the site? If the answer is yes, you’re well on your way!

Take a moment to see our flash design portfolio