group94
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- 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.
- raf0
This is actually one of my favourite dead horses to beat. As I wrote recently elsewhere:
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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
- fate0
The support for those technologies is schizophrenic.
And there's not an authoring tool (like Flash) that makes them work seamlessly.
- animatedgif0
Flash was a terrible authoring tool, Flash developers haven't used it in years, Adobe hasn't updated it or fixed the most basic of issues in it for years, Adobe doesn't care about it or it's users and the animation tools are a joke in it.
Of all the positive things you can say about Flash, this isn't one of them
- Llyod0
It's painful to see formerly great shops relegated to making wordpress sites
- 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.
- utopian0
R.I.P. Adobe Flash & Group94, what ashame!
- 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.
- 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
- mikotondria30
We've all kind of allied ourselves to a small number of seemingly unbreakable codes, that emerged in the first half of the 00s, somewhat justifiably, but we've got locked into them. They center largely around conventions of usability. What happened as Flash was bloating and web2.0 as a UX concept - and a design aesthetic, was coming to the fore, is that it - became - set - in - stone, that the logo goes top left, a properly meaningfully described menu below or to the right of that, some engaging artistic imagery below that, to include some brand values via sharp, sterile copy and design, prominent content below that, column of incidentals to the right, and middle etc etc etc. All our sites - no matter what the subject, became bound up in the old-world inherited concepts of magazine readership. Now we are driven by ipad views, we've just transplanted the previous generation of media onto the new media and it's become choked. Flash helped break the mold and evolved a novel, seemingly endless way of presenting brands and art and encouraging and fostering interaction and novel relationship-building regimes. We've stopped animating, and have confined video to formulaically live in a little box as one stop on a jquery slider. It's all become still, and static, and rigid.
We need to rediscover dynamic, novel ways to engage and entertain - not forgetting the basic usability rules that we learned by making bad flash sites. We need user paths and information easily findable, usable, relevant and sharable, but instead of a page being a single node connected to dozens of one-step journeys, we need to reintroduce story-telling and multi-step experiences, not give it all up above the fold. Now we've got bigger screens and better typographical choices and the means of production of motion and complex static graphics are more accessible. It can be the start of something it once was, if we can just break out of the paradigm that the tools control the product - it can all be powered by wp as far as I care.
etc.
- 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...
- 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.
- fadein110
I blame Jeffrey Zeldman more than Apple. Standards are a great idea of course but generating accessible cross browser sites without using plugins undoubtably stifles creativity. Apple are also to blame. My clients are small to medium and none of them will touch Flash now purely because of the iPad. Creativity and experimentation are low on the agenda nowadays. Clients have wised up to their audience. However I can see benefits to both sides.
- prophetone0
group94 = my early inspiration
- inteliboy0
I swear I used to read on here constant bitching about bad design on the web, the lack of grids or any layout principals, poor typography, stupid sounds, annoying animated navs that u need to figure out for each new website blah blah...
- 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
- 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
^ 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.
- 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.