AdvancED Flash Interface Design spells it out

I write code by day, but I combine my Actionscript skills with a love of art and design by night. Looking to pick up some new tricks, I recently picked up AdvancED Flash Interface Design by Michael Kemper, Guido Rosso, and Brian Monnone. Inside, you’ll find tips for combining the strengths of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash, all sorts of little tricks to help you achieve interesting visual effects, and a decent overview of the different stages of design, from planning to completion.

Those more inclined to coding will probably get the most benefit from early chapters since designers should already know this stuff. Chapter two, Creating Usable and Innovative Experiences, takes a high-level look at usability. Animations and cool, innovative components bring the wow-factor, but do they enhance your design, or do they make it more difficult for your user to navigate? This chapter also focuses on considering real-world metaphors to help the user relate to components. Personally, I’d be more interested in a whole book in usability, but it’s a nice primer for those that aren’t as interested in the subject as I am.

Chapter three spends all of it’s time on colors. At times, it seems that designers can grab just about any three colors in the spectrum and make them work together. Michael Kemper covers this topic very well, and outlines some good ways to use the color wheel to help you pick strong colors. If you find these methods interesting, I recommend searching online for more information about color theory. In fact, there are many free color scheme tools that you can find online to help automate this process. I’ve been familiar with color theory, the color wheel, and how computers show colors for some time, yet I still found this chapter to be one of my favorites.

Around mid-book, you’ll find a chapters focusing on vector techniques in Flash and Illustrator. I personally can’t stand using Illustrator, which gets strong focus early-on, so I skipped that part. The next chapter, on the other hand, has some better information that is more Flash-centric. You’ll find a great tutorial on creating the infamous, shiny, gel pill button. Even if you don’t like them, you might learn some good techniques for creating 3D shapes. The next chapter contains more of the same good stuff, and outlines the steps to create three different icons. It finishes up talking about 3D vector text, created in Illustrator and imported to Flash, which I felt could have been skipped. It felt thrown in because there’s still novelty in anything 3D for most people.

The chapter on video gave me the same impression. Internet video has that “hey cool” vibe. However, it had a suprisingly large amount of information on camera angles, editing, importing, cameras and media formats. The process of importing video to Flash goes step by step, and it feels too much like a manual. Honestly, this chapter is beneficial, but it could be improved. I’m more interested in learning ways to seamlessly integrate video into websites. There’s a certain clunkiness to seeing an ugly video player, and Flash has the potential to make it invisible, yet usable.

From there, we head into Photoshop with a basic website mockup and turn it into a cool design with a lot of depth and flair. When viewing the final outcome in the book’s color section, I couldn’t wait to get to this chapter. It goes step by step through the entire process just like with the vector shapes described earlier. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with this chapter. All the pictures are black and white. As each particular shadow or highlight is described, I get frustrated when I can’t actually see it in the screenshot. Now, had I been following along on my PC, I might have found it easier, but I tend to read most books in the comfort of my bed. I didn’t want to go open Photoshop. Had I seen full-color versions of each step, I could have remembered how to create these effects and tried it out later.

Later chapters cover animations and tweening, using textures, and optimization. I tend to do all of my animation through Actionscript, so Keith Peters’ book on animation is more my taste. The texturing chapter has some good info on using bitmaps, but the optimization/finishing up your site chapter is skippable.

When I have a lot to say about something, you can bet that it is either very good or very bad. In this case, AdvancED Flash Interface Design fits both categories. Early and middle chapters kept me intrigued. The sections on usability, color theory, and vector techniques all had great information that could benefit anyone creating Flash content. Later parts of the book fell a bit short, but I don’t think that detracts from the book as a whole. If you’re a design geek hobbyist, or you’re a developer who wants to learn more about the other side of Flash, this book might be something you’ll like.

About Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala is a frontend developer, open source contributor, bowler hat enthusiast, and karaoke addict. You might be familiar with his project, Feathers UI, an open source user interface library for Starling Framework that is included in the Adobe Gaming SDK.