The biggest news is that I went back to school this Spring semester for the first time in 35 years (Milwaukee Area Technical College to be precise, helluva well-equipped graphics dept.)! I decided this would be the quickest and most efficient way for me to gain an understanding and some level of expertise in Adobe Flash (CS4), and I have in fact done exactly that! Yesterday was my last day of class and I submitted my Final Project (I’ll hafta get this online soon). I gotta admit that I really enjoyed myself, learned alot, got comfortable in a program that was terra incognita to me, and generated some pretty darn good designs along the way. Am I an expert? No… but I do have expertise, unpolished but real.

After having concentrated on illustration over design (tho there’s plenty of design in every illustration, imho) these last many years, it was fun working in a medium that’s much more about designing than drawing, even when animating an illustration. Flash is kinda clunky as a generator of illustrated vector art, lots of legacy implementation and interface quirks left over from when it was a Macromedia product. Adobe really needs to give Flash an overhaul to make it sing in harmony with the rest of the CS choir. It’s much easier to create in Illustrator or Photoshop or Painter and then import those elements into Flash to make ‘em wiggle and bounce about. Also, unlike drawing or painting which relies on intuition and “happy accidents”, Flash is much more mechanical, relying on precision in the construction of the project and especially the coding (AS3) that you create to control the wiggle and bounce,  and very unforgiving if the least little bit, word or placement is incorrect, or unexpected (from the program’s point of view). Very un-illustrative. Nevertheless, it sure can do some fantastical animation, and easily too, once you know what yer doin’…

So there ya go, I’m now a Flashman (kudos, George MacDonald Fraser) and proud of it!

Talleyho!