- Industry: UX design
- Problem: I wanted a Flash website to display my portfolio
- Role: UX generalist
- Flash
- Photography
- Programming
- ASP
- ActionScript
- SQL
- Outcome: An interactive Flash website that allowed me to showcase my designs.
My journey into the world of web design took a transformative turn when I first encountered a website called Turtleshell, a Flash-based site that felt like a revelation. The fluid vector animations, immersive soundscapes, and engaging interactive elements were unlike anything I’d seen with traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Turtleshell became a daily visit for me, not just for its content but for the sheer inspiration it offered. It sparked a fascination with Flash that would shape my early career as a UX designer.
Flash was revolutionary for its time. Its built-in coding language, ActionScript, allowed for a level of interactivity and animation that was groundbreaking. ActionScript provided a powerful way to create a user experience, offering designers the ability to craft nuanced, interactive narratives that were previously impossible on the web.
One of my favorite projects from that era was my Flash portfolio site, smoothsurface (yes, all lowercase). Sadly, it no longer exists, but it was a site that represented everything I loved about Flash—elegant transitions, dynamic content loading, and a fully immersive experience. I combined Flash with Photoshop, ActionScript, ASP, and MySQL to create a site that was both visually appealing and technically sophisticated. For example, I used ASP to fetch and display real-time date information from the user’s system, rendered smoothly through ActionScript. The site featured seamless page transitions, with content dynamically loading in response to user interactions. One of my favorite features was the background music, which I composed and recorded myself. It faded in as the page loaded and out as the user navigated, adding an extra layer of immersion.
However, as much as I loved working with Flash, I became more aware of its limitations. The need for users to download a plugin to view Flash content was a significant barrier to accessibility. The Flash player could be notoriously CPU-intensive, often leading to slow performance on less powerful machines. Moreover, the content within Flash sites wasn’t indexable by search engines at the time, which posed a serious disadvantage for web visibility. And then there was the issue of loading times—Flash sites, with their rich multimedia content, could be frustratingly slow to load.
Despite these challenges, Flash was a pivotal tool in making the web a more dynamic and exciting place. It brought a sense of creativity and optimism to web design that was infectious. Every new Flash project felt like uncharted territory, full of possibilities. While we’ve moved beyond Flash as web technologies have evolved, I still look back on that era with fondness. Flash may be gone, but the spirit of innovation and creativity it embodied continues to inspire me in my work today.
