For me the bonus is that he proved that great design is just as important as the product itself. An Ipad is basically a device that pulls in apps that others created (not Apple), that’s it. A link farm. Add some camera functions and a touch screen and you’re all set. But the design can be appreciated by looking at what other companies initially came up with. Apple seemed to work better because it looked better and made more sense. Same for their Mac books. People expect a product to work but they buy it for how it looks and how it easy it is to use.  From a website to a new car.

Probably what scares me the most about his passing is how long it may be before another person comes along that will have a vision that will change the world.

That is the question.  Flash design is one of the reasons I grew in this field as much as I did.  Once I found out I could animate my artwork I was off.  While trying to herd cats with the HTML in every browser the Flash always looked perfect.  Movie sites were worth waiting 5 minutes of loading time to see.  Right when I started to get the hang of Actionscript 2 it seemed developers were taking over and then flash forgot about its designers.

Then smart phones arrived, the unfinished HTML5 became the talk of the town and bandwidth allowed videos to play without and XML playlist.  I myself realizing this started working more in After Effects than learning Actionscript 3.  Why animate video in Flash when I can use cool plugins, scripts and presets to do stuff that looks so much better in AE?  Why save it off as an FLV when I can embed an H.264 file that looks awesome in full screen?

So is Flash dead?  Well let’s view the evidence of its competitors.

• Video Codecs - Google thinks it’s Microsoft, Steve Jobs thinks he’s God and Bill Gates is playing golf.   Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 through 9 and Firefox.  That’s a lot of potential places a person might be visiting your site from and all of them would have have different requirements.  Web developers now have to write code that says “If IE6 do this, IE7 do this, IE8 show this instead, if Firefox hide this, etc.”  Google with Webm, Firefox with H.264.  HTML5?  Yeah now it’s easier to add a video to a page after you’ve encoded it in 3 different formats and code the page to show one or the other depending on what browser.
• HTML5 – For animation?  Have you seen the code it takes for this?  Yikes!  How long does it take to do something that doesn’t look like an animated GIF?  And let’s not forget that the same people that do all the amazing design work might not know HTML.  You can animate in Flash without a single bit of code writing.  The flash header on this site took about 8 minutes to create and without any Actionscript.  As much as everyone is dying to be able to ignore early browser versions, the truth is people still use them, companies more than anyone.   More people have faster bandwidth these days than newer browsers.  So the code you’re wanting to use to prevent loading times is almost competing with its own need to do so.  CSS to create a gradient?  C’mon?
• Iphone – Had one but didn’t want iTunes or having to convert all my stuff to work on it.  Is this the Flash killer, because Steve Jobs said it kills batteries?  Um, cough cough Android cough!  Keep your goofy app store.
• Ipad - When I first saw one of these in the store I couldn’t help but joke with the salesman about it being an iPod for people with bad vision.  Reminds me of the giant joke calculator at Spencer’s in the mall.  (Why are you laughing?  You know you bought one.)  My camera is 10 megapixels so I’m good, more goofy apps, more iTunes converting and no Flash.  So we’re to throw it out because of two devices?  Not good enough.  Even the new Chrome OS comes with Flash.  I just got the new one that came out 2 days after the last one.  The only difference is this one is white.  (next week I’ll spend $600 on one in blue.)  All joking aside, I have a 13 inch screen, i5, 4 gigs of ram, 320 GB hard drive, can out to an HDTV or 24 inch monitor, enjoy 4 USB ports, a smart card reader and even a place for a Firewire card.  Also I have a full keyboard with real buttons and can even out to a wireless keyboard and mouse.  I can use all my design programs with no problems whatsoever.  Wow you say, what iPod is that?  It’s the one made by Samsung.  (even folds to protect the screen.)  Good luck Apple with replacing it with your giant Ipod.

Well those are damaging reasons to throw out Flash.

Adobe can save Flash by coming back to designers, getting Wallaby up and bug free and redesigning Flash to be more like After Effects (a difficult thing being that I can’t even use blur too much without choking something.)  Leave Flex for developers and give Flash back to designers.  Maybe cutting all that developer code out might help out with the crashing and virus nonsense developers use it for.  How about Flash CS6: For Designers and Animators!  Sounds good.  Who knows, maybe even Steve Jobs will let you be on his kids toy.

The Challenge:
None at all. Was asked to create a logo that would look good on a t-shirt as well as a website. Incorporate hunting, archery and a deer skull in a way that hadn’t been done before.

The Solution:
Used colors that would work for branding the website in more earthly tones. The client didn’t have branding.

Illustrated the deer skull and arrowhead after researching for more hi tech equipment. An old indian arrow might have worked but didn’t want the customers thinking the company was old fashioned and not with the latest trends and gear. Can’t wait to see it on a t-shirt.

See a lot of jobs looking for people that use Macs and then seem to shy away from you when you say you use Windows.  As if Mac is harder to use when it’s actually created to be easier for regular people.  The big difference, click the option key instead of the alt key.  Other than that using Adobe programs is pretty much the same.  I worked on a Mac last year on a contract for Turner Sports.  Took me about 1 minute to get the hang of it.

I’ve used Macs enough to know they freeze and stutter as much as Windows so don’t see why paying more for the same problems.  An hour glass or color wheel is still the same thing, waiting.

Seems whenever the economy goes in the bin, everyone is looking for the all in one designer / coder again.  In a perfect world you want a person that has spent years in design or coding.  Finding a flash animator / designer and an expert in Actionscript is very rare. (most people that are good at Actionscript are not designers at all but programmers that just moved to it from Javascript.)

Timing is another issue.  At DAVE Networks where I spent three years designing social sites for Hollywood studios, I had a development team behind me so I could focus all my time on meeting the clients goal with the design.  Rather than skimping it to meet deadlines where I would’ve had to if coding everything was included in my workload.  Developers spend all their time researching and learning new and better ways to code, designers do the same from their side.

With design alone I have spent a lot of years learning Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Premiere, After Effects, HTML / CSS.  Even Sonar and Sound Forge for music and audio editing and composition.  I’ve dabbled with Poser, Swift 3D, InDesign, Quark and plenty of other programs.  From a design point I can offer companies a lot of skills but I wouldn’t want to dampen those skills focusing my efforts with programming.

Asking one person to do both is only hurting the company by not giving the time needed to really please the client.  Just my opinion anyway.