Well, I’m unable to put the animated gifs here, but I’ll be able to provide a link to them.
I’ll do his next week, if I have time - we are very busy developing a couple of web sites. The deadline to finish them is getting closer.
Anyway, as to animated gifs - try to use them subtly. Really. There is nothing more awful than those tacky flashy animations. And use humour or make your viewers curious or surprise them with rollovers! Good Luck.
You either love it or hate it. I used to love it..
I got into it via Director. Many years ago I used to make animations in Director which was the best tool at the time to create digital presentations. However, the shockwave version of it was just too big (it could have been reduced by using lingo), to put on the net so I introduced myself to Flash. Flash was a simpler version of Director and first I found it a bit frustrating but very soon got the hang of it and got creative in it. I even learnt ActionScript properly. By this time (at the end of the last century!) Macromedia was going to take over the web, and Shockwave was going to be an integral part of all browsers. It still isn’t. Users still have to download or upgrade the shockwave plug-in. As soon as I mention this to a client, they freak out: what is plug-in? Download? Forget it! They used to annoy me. I mean the clients. Couldn’t they just understand that Flash is the future? Flash is funky - Flash is dynamic! No, they just wanted something that browsers can display without plug-ins.
And they were so right. Recently I was surfing the net and came across a site. My Shockwave plug-in needed to be upgraded. Although I knew it would have taken very little time to download it (having done it many times over the years, as well as being on broadband) I just couldn’t be bothered to do it. Oh, not again… not now - was my response, so I clicked away. So this is the simple truth of it. If I couldn’t be bothered to upgrade it why would anybody else? And that’s saying something. In fact it’s saying it all.
So what’s the use of Flash? I guess it’s a great way to create funky adverts or promote brand names, for example Absolute Vodka. Their site is really cool. People would search on the brand name, so it’s OK. But if you have, let’s say, a law firm -creating a site in Flash is just not appropriate because you would alienate many viewers i.e. potential clients. Not to mention the Search Engines, as they can’t read the text in a Flash file, so your site won’t be picked up (there are some ways around this problem - I’ll write about this subject later). If you need a good site, or you’re a web site designer you’re better off sticking to good old HTML ( with CSS of course) and gif animations.
Animated gifs can be just as creative as Flash animations and can be made interactive too. I used to dislike gif animations because I thought they were crude and stupid and lacked the flexibility and freedom Flash provided. Soon I realised that, in a weird kind of way, you can be more creative with animated gifs - precisely because of their limitations. Freedom doesn’ make you think - it just let’s you be. Limits, boundaries, constraints of any kind allow you (make you!) to be constructive, clever and creative.
Anyway, I can now make wonderful, funny and very effective gif animations that can have a big impact, yet are small in size.
So will Flash die out? I don’t think so. But until it truly is an integral part of all browsers, most commercial sites won’t use it. Nor will our clients want to have anything to do with it.
Today is the 13th - and it’s a Friday. And the Olympics are starting. Is this good luck or bad luck? We shall see..
I’m not a great fan of Sport of any kind but I always like the Olympics. There is something about the games that makes me sit in front of the telly and watch sport for hours. Maybe it’s the community spirit versus individualism, or the beautiful human bodies or might just be the fact that this only happens every 4 years!
Actually, probably that’s what it is. The 4 year interval. We sympathise with the athletes because they’ve been training for 4 years and one moment or one mistake or one tiny external factor could make them lose or win. Scary. Yet life is the same. I’m sure most of us, when we watch the Olympics, subconsciously sum up our last four years - what have done and haven’t done since the last games - are we losers or winners in the games of life?
Anyway, it’s good to see the Olympics back in Europe, particularly in Greece. I hope they’ll do as well as the Spanish did in Barcelona - which, I think was the best hosted & spirited games (in my life time anyway). Good luck to them and good luck to all the athletes. Perhaps Friday the 13th will be a good omen.