Flash Tenth Anniversary

R Blank

http://www.almerblank.com
http://www.rblank.com

R Blank has been an interactive designer, developer, author, and teacher for over 12 years. He is currently CTO of Almer/Blank, a Flash Solutions Alliance Partner based in Venice, California, that specializes in video and application development for the Flash Platform for Fortune 500 clients including E! Entertainment Television, Microsoft, Apple and IKEA. He holds four Flash certifications and was one of the first 50 certified Flash developers in the world.

Additionally, R founded and runs LA Flash, a community of over 1,700 industry professionals and home to three Adobe User Groups (AUGs) for Flash. R also teaches Flash and ActionScript on the engineering faculty of the University of Southern California.

Previously, R co-founded Wildform, where he co-created Flix, the first video encoder for Flash. R has an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA from Columbia University. He is also the author of the DMTS Training DVD, Inside Flash 8.

How and when did you get started with Flash?

I started with Flash in 1999, when I worked at an interactive agency in New York and we built what I think was the first major e-commerce site in Flash for Tiffany & Co. Even though Flash 4 was out, we had to use Flash 3 because of player penetration rates. I quickly became entranced with two key characteristics of Flash: first, its amazing multimedia capabilities (even way back in Flash 3 and 4) and second, its ability to perform on any platform as intended. It wasn’t long before I was completely in love with the tool and left my job to start a company called Wildform, where we created Flix, the first video encoder for Flash (now owned by On2)— again, way back in Flash 4 before anything like the FLV format existed. When I subsequently started my own interactive design agency, I focused more and more on Flash projects because those were, without fail, the most fun and interesting projects around. And now that my agency has grown, Flash Platform projects form almost our entire business.

How has Flash contributed to your creativity, or taught you about design and the web?

Because of its ubiquity, Flash has really opened up a whole world of possibilities for creativity and expression—with the ability to deliver most any type of media to most any computer. And through ActionScript, it is possible to sculpt, with unbelievable precision, the viewer’s interaction with the experience. For example, you can assign button interactivity when the viewer rolls over or off a button, clicks the button, releases the button, drags the button, releases the button outside, and so forth. All this freedom provides designers with a tremendous variety of options when designing digital experiences. It also gives developers the power to abandon or abuse standards that have been established over decades of GUI computing. Take the scrollbar for example: The current concept of a scrollbar has evolved over years and years of use by millions of people around the world, and as a result we have an efficient, easy to use mechanism for scanning large amounts of content, that is immediately understood and approachable by most everyone in the world. Yet many designers create scrollbars that contradict these standards, that are difficult to use, and whose design may completely obscure its function. Given the tremendous amount of information people must sort through on a daily basis, it is important to minimize viewer friction in the interfaces to that information.

Of course, not everything is as simple, or as simply resolved, as a scrollbar. Many things now possible in Flash were simply never possible before, and the top interactivity designers are constantly seeking ways to create brand new experiences that are also, in some basic way, familiar and understandable. This debate on the boundaries of man-machine interaction, has been esoteric for many years, because the computing devices that were widely available were so limited in their interactive and multimedia capabilities. Now, with Flash increasingly expanding into the device universe, people are becoming surrounded with rich, interactive interfaces and media experiences everywhere they look, from their cell phones, to their TVs, to their cars. So, at the boundary of the newest, most exciting experiences, I think we will continue to see this tension as designers try to create fresh new experiences that are also easy to understand and fun— even delightful— to use.

Please share one or more favorite tips, lessons, or cautionary tales about Flash.

Flash today is so massive, I can’t imagine trying to come fresh to it now— there’s just so much to learn. As Flash becomes larger and larger, and the industry becomes more mature and more segmented, my main piece of advice is to begin by focusing in one area— become known for something in particular— rather than trying to market your services as a master of the tool in general. Are you good at writing games? Do you design super-lush, movie-quality websites? Are you good at creating motion design experiences? Are you better at architecting applications, or perhaps using Adobe® After Effects® and integrating video into rich Flash experiences? The options are so broad and growing, I think it’s easy to lose sight of the need for focus.

Precisely because Flash is so useful for so many different applications, Adobe can only do so much to create an authoring tool that’s optimized for all the uses it’s put to. So my second piece of advice is to learn good workflow habits early. Learn how to use templates, projects, swatches, and even JSFL (yes, even you nonprogrammers out there) and see what extensions already exist on the Exchange. With these tools, Adobe has given developers a huge amount of flexibility in adapting Flash to accelerate the wide variety of unique workflows that exist with the Flash Platform tools.