group94
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- prophetone0
pass the mashed potatas
- prophetone0
amen
- prophetone0
what the misinformed cheddar heads choose to ignore is that wordpress has nothing really to do with looks or even set info architecture. it's an engine. wrap your brilliant design around it and do something different.
as for bootstrap, well, it suffers a fate even worse as most of the bootstrap-driven sites i've seen so far don't really push it beyond the out-of-the-box look/feel. it's great. but in the end, it's a grid system with the side of extras, there are others out there. a few i like better, personally.
but why are we here? well because group94 ruled the skool and it was a delight to check out their work when flash was my girlfriend.
r.i.p. flash. i loved you so.
- fadein110
^ thats a criticism of the people who use the software not the software itself. An easy to use CMS for all (or most) is surely a good thing.
- Continuity0
WordPress gets heat because of its ubiquity, kind of in the same way Microsoft does. It's the Ugly Beige Box of a Computer of the design world, united in a sort of lazy mediocrity of sameness. It gets slagged off precisely because it's too easy to implement on a basic for even the most dunderheaded out there. It provides _just enough_ aesthetic to make it not look like the site was designed using Paint Shop Pro/Netscape Composer, which is good enough for the overwhelming majority.
Hot on its heels, as I mentioned in my note above, is Twitter Bootstrap. It, too, is customisable, but it also is in the 'just enough' aesthetic category as WordPress out of the box, that many of its users just implement is as-is, unleashing even more mediocre, banal websites on the world.
Never mind RIP Flash ... RIP Creativity.
- there were a lot of boring flash sites as well. thousands of themfadein11
- fadein110
is wordpress the new whipping boy? people who haven't used it seem to criticise it. Its just a CMS - the front end can look however you like. wordpress is good for certain sites and although a lot of people are lazy and use themes it certainly doesn't deserve the slating its getting here. I don;t have to pay a programmer to do the CMS anymore so double the profit :)
- Twitter Bootstrap will be the new whipping boy soon.Continuity
- prophetone0
group94 = my early inspiration
- formed0
ib - we are old men. I got excited about web design because of Flash and what people were doing. 99.9% of sites are rubbish now. Flash made bad sites really bad, but it also allowed for amazing sites to really shine.
It was a plugin, and it worked consistently from browser to browser. When will we see that reliability again?
Someday, perhaps, we'll get the polished look/experience of Flash, but it is a long way off. Hopefully I am wrong.
I feel really sorry for those that dedicated their took the time/patience to excel at it.
m3 - sad. funny. true. gotta let the past rest. I'll tell the next generation of what once was.
- inteliboy0
I'd say it was more of this wild west immature playground, rather then a golden age of web design.
Not being facetious here -- I'd love to see some examples of what were these "risk-taking, creative site experiences"? I remember a few instances, say the viral promotion for the Donnie Darko movie... but most I'd say will fall apart under todays standards...
- mikotondria30
Oh dear ^, inteliboy - it's a nostalgia for the movement and creative environment and culture that it fostered rather than any technical aspect of the tool (which was a bitch, if we're honest).
90% of everything is rubbish. I'd say even more sites are bad now, because they're bland.
It was a great time to be creative around 2003 if you were ahead of the curve you could easily bosh out the sort of individual, risk-taking, creative site experiences that clients lined up for, and there was always some awesome new exciting site to learn from that pushed the boundaries of UX, UI and the platform.
Flash drew closely together so many design disciplines and made it easy to learn about layout, typography, animation, motion graphics, scripting, backend coding. When Adobe naturally tried to expand each of these aspects further into their relevant fields, it began to fall apart - as3 was a bridge too far and the fertile little intersection it had enjoyed diminished.
Had Adobe spent their time and money perfecting the problems with Flash rather than setting it icarus-like toward the sun, we'd still be using it today.
If you ever loved Flash, you'll share my heavy heart at how watching it die, it was a bitter pill watching Mr Jobs et al tread over it on their particular journey, but like a brave pal in an old war movie, we knew it was never going to make it home.
'Go on without me', it gasped, around 2008 - 'I'll be ok.'
Last seen whoring itself out on facebook on a massive cartoon farm.
RIP.- Stop drilling you have struck oil. The internet was fun creative and beautiful. Never do you hear this about sites these days.chossy
- er...okmikotondria3
- inteliboy0
You guys sound like old men, with this romantic idea of the good ol times. 90% of flash sites were utter rubbish. Plus it was a plugin. Good riddance.
- utopian0
R.I.P. Adobe Flash & Group94, what ashame!
- chossy0
100% agree flash was absolutely amazing it made the internet interesting virile and fresh. Sites these days are dry and completely soules.
Creativity comes from restriction, in my opinion is nonsense. A creative mind is a free mind. Slam some pretty solid walls of code around that mind and watch the web crumble. Just look at group 94.
- Llyod0
It's painful to see formerly great shops relegated to making wordpress sites
- raf0
This is actually one of my favourite dead horses to beat. As I wrote recently elsewhere:
--
Flash was a fantastic technology which still hardly can be matched 15 years later. It had to go though because it never overcame its major issues, most stemming from the fact that it was a lump of foreign body in the browser.
- It never communicated with JS smoothly enough.
- It broke standard browser UI behaviours — history, back/forward button, escape, save as.
- It resided within a fixed-size space and while this could be changed, it wasn't cooperating with JS/DOM smoothly enough.
- It had deep linking problems requiring hash hacks to work (and not smoothly across browsers).
- It didn't have a clear and simple way of embedding and when people came up with FlashObject they got legal threats from Adobe and had to rename it to SWFObject — which was just a sample of what to expect from them in the future.
- On top of that, Adobe kept screwing their original customer base — designers — by focusing on making Action Script a "proper" programming language rather than multimedia authoring tool. I know many designers who never even licked AS3.0, dropping Flash entirely instead.
- SEO incompatibility was a biggie too.
Add to that, the web was ready to get simpler. I was one of those who believed internet in the 2010's would be like interactive television. I was wrong, it went on to become something simple and text-based, like the "interactive print" it is now.
If you search QBN from 2006, 2007 you'll see people were doubting Flash had a future in web as it was. Remember the fiasco of Roadrunner, Kontain and other FI sites?
- "it was a lump of foreign body in the browser."i_was
- The web is "interactive print". Are you kidding?studderine
- breadlegz0
formed - I agree with you that that's what happened. But I disagree that's how it needs to stay.
In my humble opinion, the best creativity comes from restriction and that's what we have now.
- formed0
Yup, when Apple killed Flash they essentially killed web design, imho.
Still a need for websites, obviously, but the 'design' part has been dumbed down to boring WordPress looking themes. It'll be a while before we really see good/great design again, imho.
Clients still want Flash-like quality/sophistication, but they will never (or mine won't) pay to develop something with the way things are now.
A shame, I loved G94's work for so long.
- Adobe killed flashmonospaced
- HTML5 and CSS3 are great tools, not as practical as flash but close enough for now.zarkonite
- breadlegz0
Looks like they relied pretty heavily on flash to make their designs work. These new ones are pretty bland.