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The Rise of and Death of Flash

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T

he History and Future of Adobe Flash

On December 31, 2020, the Adobe Flash Player was officially discontinued. Adobe finally stopped updating and distributing the Flash Player plugin, a.k.a. Shockwave Flash and blocked Flash content from running in the player starting January 12, 2021. Flash actually was done and finally died. Before the end of Flash, let’s give credit where credit is due. Flash was miraculous. It enabled new possibilities on the web, helped bring video and video sharing to the internet, and most importantly, it got some people interested in designing for the web.

Flashback

As a college student in the 1990s, being a graphic designer mostly meant creating graphics, logos, magazines, books, posters, album art, T-shirts… basically the print world. There were no online experience and courses. When the internet came along, and everyone and anyone seemed to need a website, many designers were stumped since this web thing required code.

Most designers never had to code and didn’t need to since Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, Freehand, and QuarkXPress did the work for us. Import elements, place objects, move them around, scale them, change their color or size, it happened easily thanks to “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) software.

Print Alone…No Longer

Why learn to code? Designers just left the web to computer scientists, computer engineers, and software developers. They understood the matrix of letters, numbers, and symbols that made up Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). They were also much faster typists. A lot of graphic designers didn’t care about HTML. “Let the coders deal with coding,” we thought, “and we’ll stick to print.”

Many of us did, until we saw new opportunities for our clients who had to be on the web and it became a matter of evolve or be left behind. Fortunately, web layout software had arrived that promised to make getting a website designed quickly and easily. GoLive CyberStudio (later acquired by Adobe), Adobe PageMill, and HoTMetaL helped you design for the web since the software’s backend rendered the necessary HTML. Imagine Microsoft Word, but instead of a page with images and text that you can print, it makes a page you can put on the web. (Even older versions of Word let you convert documents to HTML for the web, and today’s versions still let you do this.)

Even with these early web design tools, designers had mixed feelings. The typography was so limited. One of my university professors was appalled that you couldn’t layout a site with Univers or any other specialty font that a company might have as part of their corporate identity branding.

On top of the expensive software we already needed, if we did not want to learn coding we would have to pay for another tool? Art supplies, computer peripherals, digital camera equipment, etc., etc., it was already expensive and especially for those on a budget.

On the other hand, design educator Ken Hiebert, author of Graphic Design Sources and Graphic Design Processes, found software such as GoLive to be a real blessing. The story from Hiebert’s perspective: we had been using PostScript fonts on a daily basis as well as PostScript laser printers, but that didn’t require us to read and write PostScript. GoLive handled HTML in a similar way: design what you needed, let it spit out the code, and upload it when you’re ready, without really needing to know HTML. If you wanted to get on the web without knowing code, GoLive or PageMill were a small price to pay. And if you were a visual thinker, those programs were right up your alley.

One Plugin, One Solution (Almost)

By the late 90s, and even with the advances in web design, things were limited. Software could take care of most of the work, but you still needed to have some basic knowledge of HTML to make sure everything displayed properly. Additionally, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were on the horizon, and that was a whole new thing you would have to learn to make your site look and function as it was designed.

To complicate matters, Browser Wars as well as slow internet speeds caused other challenges. Designers just wanted a better web, an experience that was designed rather than coded. Better typography!! Sound! Animation too! Why not? For starters, it wasn’t easy to achieve. Even Macromedia’s Dreamweaver a program that promised a better web, was still a challenge and some coding was needed.

Then everything changed with the release Flash, first named FutureSplash Animator, later acquired by Macromedia. Text, vector graphics, and images could be composed in a layout and uploaded to the web, with many if not all of the refinements designers had become accustomed to. For example, if you wanted to use a particular font on the web, especially as a headline or button, you needed to make that text into a bitmap image that often looked rough. Today text as image is not done due to Google and SEO technology.

Flash to Make Them Dance

When Macromedia acquired FutureSplash and released it as Macromedia Flash, a world of possibilities arrived. Yes, you had to pay for the Flash software to make a Flash site, but it was worth it. Visually, new possibilities emerged. Artists and designers pushed the web into new and unforeseen directions.

Flash appealed to a certain audience, a creative one. “Flash was the internet that we thought we were going to get. Make things look more digital and less like documents. HTML and CSS websites were simpler then, but Flash was for visual artists, it was something you could relate to. With Flash, code was secondary, and the elements were visual.”

If you wanted to make your own digital art or online experiment or website, you could quickly and easily learn Flash by reading a how-to books, taking classes, or you could learn with Lynda tutorials. I started making my own custom Flash work, focusing on websites and motion graphics.

Flash Giveth, Flash Taketh Away

In the early 2000s, design was undergoing an identity crisis. Maybe the animated logos weren’t needed? Maybe Flash is not the best way to go for the whole site? You could design your layout and slice it up using Macromedia Fireworks, with or without Flash content. Add all the features and animation and sound and Flash headers you want. The sky was the limit and many designers and clients wanted to push the limits.

“I want my website to my creative thoughts and design!” Creating unique, thought-provoking artistic experiments with Flash was one thing, but using Flash to make an eccentric website for users who wanted and/or needed something simple, seemed difficult for users. Approaching web design like a kid in a candy store, some would put every and any tasty ingredient into a bowl, mix it around, and offer it up as a super, special, flashy treat. So much to see and explore with this new technology! Some designers thought it was their duty to challenge conventions, going so far as to “hide buttons” so the user had to work to find them. At the time, this was considered pushing the creative limits!

 

In 2001 Apple didn’t require the Flash plugin to use their site, but they did use bitmap images to render type. Captured via the web.archive.org.

As designers and non-designers packed more and more effects into their web content using Flash, or chose to hide web content, sites became complicated and/or unusable. Some clients wanted the complex, but larger sites with more content resulted in longer load times, meaning longer wait times, especially if you had an animated logo that required many seconds to minutes of your patience before the website even loaded.

These long Flash Intros, became the norm. In order to let a site fully load in the background, a short introduction, animation, video, or game would keep users busy and/or entertained, which really just annoyed people. In time a solution would come in the form of a button. Users who didn’t want to wait and watch an intro could jump ahead by clicking Skip Intro.

On the plus side, Flash brought people from all walks of life to web design, but we had been led astray by wanting to create one shiny thing after another. Eventually it was too much and a change was needed. We saw what the web could be, and what it shouldn’t be. Many designers and non-designers realized that the flashy animations didn’t matter as much as the content and the users. Fancy sites shouldn’t corrupt the experience. It’s all about people and usability matters.

Usability is less about flashy sites, and more about function. Create simple sites and, Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). Books like Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design by Duncan McAlester & Michelangelo Capraro taught readers to design for users. If that meant learning code in order to be a better designer, better artist, and a better web developer, then so be it. Some Flash designers did just that. As each new version of Flash gained abilities and ultimately ActionScript, which required learning more code to create Flash sites and features.

Flash Blows Up, for Better and Worse

In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia and all of their products, including Flash. By that time, it seemed like everyone and anyone used Flash, even an startup named YouTube. Entertainment could reach the masses, video had evolved, and so did the internet. As design and development for the web advanced, you could do more than ever before with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They were lightweight and did not require a fancy Flash plugin that might crash your browser. You did have to learn more detailed code though, and for some visual designers that was difficult.

Better yet, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript did not require you to purchase a piece of pricey software to get the job done, provided you were somewhat fluent with those web development platforms and had a text editor such as TextWrangler or BBEdit. In terms of web content, or content itself became king and blogs had blown up. Content Management Systems (CMS) became the way to get on the web quickly and easily.

Flash was beginning to look especially outdated and threatened, when Steve Jobs critized it, keeping it off the iPhone. To make matters worse, Flash had become a pathway for criminals who would use it to attack your computer, as routinely reported by security experts such as Brian Krebs.

Turns out, most of us don’t miss Adobe Flash, especially if you own an iPhone, iPod, or iPad. Some miss Flash now that it’s completely gone because it changed the way we look at web design and think about the web. Flash was the original engine that helped make YouTube work. Now that Flash is officially dead, doesn’t it deserve some respect? Some credit? Who really knows? Like the opening animations and videos that Flash spawned during its glory days, we’ll have to wait and see.

 

 

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