This article includes explicit language - sorry. Im not editing it out.
Am I going to use an image of a tombstone and the flash logo - no I’m not. Im going to use the picture of the peoples republic of China where everybody is subject to the will of the state. I think it’s a good analogy because thats what we’ve become. Subject to the will of large American corporations like Google. Are they best placed to decide our futures? I would strongly disagree they are - even though I make no bones about being a massive Apple fan. Well more of a fan of the OS actually if Im honest. Not so much their corporate ambitions and wills.
I should set the context of this. I have made a lot of web content that required the glossy touch - animation, interactivity and mixed media. I have seen the adoption of HTML5 over Flash player and built content for both platforms so I thought Id discuss how I feel about the changes that have taken place.
In 2000 website building was like the Wild West. Everybody knew somebody that did it. Every website was different to every other website. And some were a full on assault of the eyeballs as well as being totally unusable. Twenty years later websites are now uniform. That’s what we wanted. But now websites are uniform It’s horrible. I think its actually worse than it was before. I would rather look at someones ugly website and breath the fresh air of novelty, than look at another carbon copy of a Google influenced, dull template without life. A dentist surgery website in Corby looks like a back page order site for M&S. There is a massive lack of differential. You’re a dentist in Corby - fucking embrace it. You’re not meant to have a website that looks like you’re part of a multinational conglomerate. Even with the ‘cutesy’ theme. It’s still thoroughly shit. I expect to see moderately good looking real people not models and obviously photoshopped interiors. I know Im going to step through the door and its not going to be anything like whats portrayed. I’m a human being. Extend me that courtesy.
And who’s to blame for this state of affairs. Is it the designers that refuse to indulge any coding skills? You either hang out for a job with a large agency so they can specialise on exciting projects or fold and make shit websites with templates for the rest of your life. There is barely any middle ground any more. No private enterprise. You go big or go home. Then you have the technical nazis that have enforced rigorous standards to the extent that moving outside of the parallel lines is considered professional suicide. Or could it be the clients that just want their product to work everywhere on everything and look exactly the same no matter what. Could be. Social media - it entertains a lot of video content with animation, but never ending pages? Its mind melting.
A massive chunk has to be placed at the feet of the large corporations Apple, Microsoft, Google etc - I’d argue it’s a heavy handed approach. Im pretty sure they lobbied and cajoled standard groups and so on. Its all very well doing this from the top but its the small people that see the results in their pockets.
And yes, I see the standards and a lot of it is a good thing. Readable type, works on mobile and so on. And yes - amazing sites with exciting content. But who sees them? Its lost all its unpredictability and some of the excitement with it. Its not about a lack of good designers, its about a lack of clients or companies willing to engage in something thats seen as extraordinary where once it wasn’t. Now its either the bleeding edge of technology or very, very standard. There is no in-between.
One of the key components that made website building in 2000 different to making sites in 2020 is that Adobe Flash player existed. Adobe officially killed off Flash player. This is not news. This is not about that. Steve Jobs, iPads blah blah blah. But it’s come with a significant loss I think. I can see this from my perspective. What they also killed off was excitement, originality, craft and just the je ne sais quoi of the internet. Yes, Porsche will still be making shit hot sites with the latest web bling, and McDonalds will make funny and entertaining web product. But what about much lesser clients. What if you’re not Nike?
In case you don’t know, Flash player was a browser plugin - and Flash was the Adobe software that allowed you to create the content. It was made to work with svg but would handle bitmap. Timeline was key - although eventually you could write non linear software with actionsctipt. Adobe bought Flash from Macromedia way back in pre 2010 and Adobe kept the Flash name eventually making it Animator when they started to see the writing on the wall. In the beginning Flash player did a bit of interactivity, animation and you could use a few components. It was light and agile. At the end it was an authoring environment for creating software. Flash player supported all manner of inputs and outputs, which was really why it eventually started to come undone.
There are two facets to the demise of Flash player. 1 - the very high bar set for designers or web animators now. 2 - difficulty in actually finding interesting work.
There are or was rather very glaring technical issues with Flash player. Don’t get me wrong - I saw them, Im aware. Primary is that its a single platform that attracts all hackers. If you’re going to set out to cause mayhem, it makes an easy target. But is there actually a need to make a comprehensive all enclosed web application? When we just had books and magazines, strangely we didn’t actually need a weather update or to be notified what somebody was thinking at that exact time of the day. Flash was really good at just adding some great bits of design to enhance the website. And you say ‘well what about HTML5’ as it does the same job. Yes it does. As a designer I could use a lot of what was on offer in Flash. In HTML5, I have to have a very good understanding of Javascript usually, code libraries, the operation of page loading and so on and so on. Its a very high bar for designers that don’t have the coding skills. For programmers the money is in more architectural site building, not making site enhancements. Games makers have the skills but the platforms are different. So who’s actually doing this stuff now? The answer is a very few specialists.
Then you come onto the issue of what clients actually want. Im someone thats create a lot of animated content via banners. These are a good example of a regular requirement for often animated and sometimes interactive content. But even this trade in its a bit of a quandary. Previously it was all done in Flash, and that was simple. Now its HTML5. In that time, there have been lots of possible suitors for the crown. Adobe had a good go with Edge, Google has designer. Greensock was a library that allowed you handle all the same things with code directly. Not easy or intuitive. CSS3? Its quite hard. No matter what anyone says - Flash was accessible and made this type of thing very easy.
I made some very complex animations in Flash / Actionscript with OOP programming that created visual effects. You can do this in HTML5 but again, Its all down to libraries and its much more complex than it was with one platform and one code language. And so this means that because the event of adding this type of content is much more skilled and time consuming it puts the content out of the reach of those with all but the biggest pockets. And so this rich content is pushed away for more regular uniform content thats predictable.
The second facet as I mentioned, getting work. Once this type of thing was easily done. If you were scouting Indeed, or previous incarnations you used two key words. Flash or actionscript. Freelancers knew where they were and companies that wanted that skill knew where they were. Now companies don’t know what to write themselves half the time. Its a complete minefield. Do you use javascript? We I could be using that to make site architecture, or any number of things. Do you use one of the libraries like Greensock as a keyword? well seemingly not. So again, rich content - multimedia, whatever you want to call it is put out of reach because it becomes a specialist item, and therefore much more expensive and difficult. As with the dinosaurs, if you had developed a highly singular skill, the moment the meteor hit - you’re stuffed. So many designers just want an easy accessible stream of income. So you build a website according to a template and everybody goes along with it.
When I started making this type of content there were a lot of people using it, people making it, companies requesting it - I knew loads of people. Now, you try and find a company that makes this type of content. Its a job just to explain to clients whats possible, or for clients to see stuff they like and request it. Its all an expensive gamble. Thats why it seems to me most of it is involved with games where the end result is concrete so you can swallow up the r&d in the budget.
So in essence this is all about getting what you want and then realising that actually you want something else. You threw the baby out with the bath water. We’ve got just as many annoying ads. We’re still at risk of being hacked or scammed. We seem to be moving in the direction of consulting with the user, but does that have to come at the cost of loosing all that non uniformity? I see the huge expanse of websites made commercially and almost exclusively bland springs to mind. What have we done?
Worthy successors
Its not all bad. There are a lot of very good code libraries now and designers making very exciting websites with them for all that I have said. They make the job of animating and making interactive content very easy in HTML5. They are all bit different in flavour depending on your requirements. They are not inherently used for animation in a linear sense, so you might use PixiJS to create the animations in a game for example. Im not saying you couldn’t do it, it would just require a lot of work, where you might just as easily make the animation in a bit of software like Animator and import it, particularly if you need fine control over non uniform action.
This is my favourite by a long chalk. You could actually use Flash with it - by using a third party bit of software that packaged the Flash / Animator item and imported it. That way you could utilise the best bits of Flash / Animator and Pixi. But very steep learning curve. In reality to find a viable client job you’d need a massive company that was specialised in glossy content. When you look at the sites in their example pages they are all very high end or very experimental.
Not one Ive used, but looking at the site, there are some pretty amazing effects for whatever you’re doing. Theres a really nice interactive example picker on the front page.
Im not a fan of Greensock if I'm honest. Its not intuitive. Proper animation ie cell frame style needs an interface not programming because you can scrub back and forth to see how it looks, but then I guess you could say many of the alteratives don't either so - it's one of the most popular.
I personally love this library because it makes possible all kinds of large block animations that just lift websites.
Again - Iv'e not had reason to use so far but I love the feel of the site, and it makes me want to delve a bit further.
Its been built on Flash so its bound to be fairly good as an animation tool in the traditional sense. Ive never used it but its going to be fairly good at outputting animated interactive HTML5 content.