Flash Out of the Box

Chapter 6. Building an animated Ad

In this chapter we continue our exploration of Flash animation, including text effects, shape tweens, visual transitions, and timeline effects. We’ll see how understated animation can contribute to an effective and compelling design.

Despite the fact that Flash is not a powerful bitmap editor, it is capable of creating some cool effects. All it takes is a little creativity and some know-how. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the techniques used to create text, graphic, and bitmap effects. What you learn here will prepare you for Chapter 7. The two chapters together give you a glimpse of the skills used to create sites like the over-the-top 2Advanced Studios (http://www.2advanced.com) and many others, so get ready to use some cool Flash design techniques.

By the way, I don’t necessarily recommend designing Flash sites like the 2Advanced Studios site. While the effects and transitions are visually very cool, many users will find the heavy use of eye candy intrusive when trying to acquire information from the site. That said, you can create many effects in Flash that not only support your content, but can bring it to life via the art of motion and graphic design.

Revealing objects Over Time

First, we’ll use Flash to create two more animations and increase our ability to bring our ideas to life. We’ll start by creating a typewriter effect, which will give us practice using text animation. Many of the same principles apply to motion graphics, but it ...