JainDec 8 2009 10:21 AM
Why does such an awesome website have to be written completely in Flash?
kixvixDec 8 2009 12:44 PM
these are great. thanks for the link!
andré felipeDec 8 2009 2:34 PM
You\'re not the first one who wonders about that, it\'s actually pretty normal because of your, mine (and most people) experience with flash on the past. Remember those \"skip intros\" and \"watch how cool I move menus\"??
So, Why?
Because it is well suited for t/g posters positioning: an image browser. It takes advantage of interaction features (keyboard and mouse – arrow keys, shortcuts, dragging, mousewhell, etc) and gives the freedom to work on ergonomics and control how it works from ground up.
And for our focus it couldn\'t be more exciting, the inDesign team brought in full typographical control to the platform (ligatures, baseline alignment, crispy and clear rendering… ), just beautiful!
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/
Well, it does take some time to get the site pleasant to use so I would strongly recommend reading to help section for some tips and shortcuts.
Also allow me to excuse myself, the actual t/g posters website is just the core of the project and I think it will get close to completion only in march 2010.
I\'ll try to clear some misconceptions about Flash now.
The basics and usual drawbacks of Flash use are:
. linking straight to a page
. browser history buttons (previous/next page)
. image save or linking*
. ctrl/cmd + click and open in a new tab
. search engine crawling
. mobile acceptance
For the first four it all depends if the developer care to do it because they are all possible to overcome. Try testing them on our site: http://t-g.me
*well you still can\'t drag the images straight to your desktop, but right click them and all the options are there
For search engine crawling:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html
Mobile acceptance:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/mobile_demos_fp10.1.html
So, flash hasn\'t stopped evolving and thankfully flash developers neither. Today the flash platform yields control and freedom to deliver full featured applications on browsers everywhere and soon, with flash player 10.1, your TV and iPhone Apps*: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
* not iPhone\'s Safari yet, but I think it is a matter of time, flash it absolute for multimedia content and it is a requirement to Apple and Adobe work on it.
But despite all these technical side of Flash, my point of view as a graphic designer is that Flash most powerful advantage is design freedom, both ergonomical and graphical.
To bring the whole experience into a fully controlled environment and care for how each section presents itself and respond to ourselves is priceless.
In that context the best feature of the site is actually the \"esc\" key, which you can hit anytime to bring you back to the directory browser. I think it comprehends how we would like that application to respond.
So to sum typo/graphic posters takes advantage of Flash for its full control over interactivity but also makes it just an extra step to port an iPhone version or an application which you could use on a TV and place as a digital poster in your wall, synched online)
While Flash definitely is not the right choice for everything, that\'s why I believe it\'s the right choice for typo/graphic posters.RafaDec 8 2009 11:33 PM
Take it easy man! haha
Thanks for some useful information about flash, from an antiflasher.AaronDec 9 2009 4:00 PM
The flash component in the site is http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/ replacement check it out.
Dale CampbellDec 10 2009 10:41 AM
Thank you so much for sharing. That gun poster is freakin\' sweet!
I would love to have a copy of that hanging in my office.Dave SDec 10 2009 1:41 PM
Great stuff- who did the gun print? ///
SkylarDec 10 2009 1:46 PM
@Dave S, it was designed by Sagmeister, Inc. (mouse over for credits).
BrendanDec 11 2009 8:53 AM
Andre, is there any way to order the prints? I\'d love to have a gun poster.
Even if there was a higher-res version that I could print - that\'d be sweet.
And I like the Flash site, even though the horizontal scrolling in the individual sections wasn\'t intuitive to me.Hi Brendan, not yet. That is a project for the the year ahead, definitely a very important and requested one.
There is no hi-res version of the posters but you could contact the authors personally, they are very receptive and will sure appreciate your interest in their work.
About the site you\'re right, I\'ve had a few complaints about that and the search field too.. this learning curve to use the site is a problem, I\'ll try to overcome this.
cheers!nQuoDec 16 2009 1:12 AM
great post. love typography
the gun print is on display at MoMA (New York): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nquo/4188950847/DanDec 16 2009 9:55 AM
Anyway, I think it\'s the worst choice do a website like this using Flash. So much extra work trying to have basic features inherent from html. I don\'t like it. Sorry, Sincerely, I\'m sure using html and javascript this website will have the same design layout and features + the inherents capabilities and very appreciated from html like change size of the text, links to individual pages, etc.. Excuse me, same not. Better and faster. Maybe compatible too with mobiles doing nothing extra programming.
I asume that you worked this side to adapt website for being good for search engines. But, why did this effort having the html? I can\'t understand. Do a website like t/p with Flash is an step against the user, against the web and most important against the essence of the T/P project. Rememeber that Google is not the only search engine, and today they still poor crawling Flash websites.
My advice is simply: Re-do it completely in html.uh! and I forget:
Code is poetry, code is Semanthic.
, vcard, rel=\"\", etc…ul>li> ol> p> em> strong> h1> h2> h3> h4> dl> dt> dd> hr>, vcard, rel=\"\", etc…
Hi Dan, you are not wrong. If that website was HTML it would work fine too.
Anyway I hope whoever visits typo/graphic posters, being a pro-flash or pro-html, have a pleasant time viewing all those beautiful posters.
I hope too, people don\'t even notice the website. It is not a matter of showing coding skills, it\'s a matter of viewing those posters in the most comfortable and efficient way.Code enables poetry.
Code is language as mathematics, music, dance, painting and writing are languages.
It\'s just hard though to use codes to express in poetry… we usually use codes to develop a software which is expected to work in a very much mechanical way.Ashely AdamsDec 24 2009 3:00 AM
The trigger in the MoMA version (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nquo/4188950847/) is red and has obvious connotations. Looks like a remnant from the McCarthy era.