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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Broad Yet Applicable, May 31, 2006
This review is from: AdvancED Flash Interface Design (Advanced Design) (Paperback)
AdvancED Flash Interface Design is the latest installment from Friends of ED. Incidentally, while reading an interview with Chris Mills, I recently learned that the ED in the title is capitalized for a reason. "Friends of Every Designer" is what the company name stands for. Read blogs folks, you'll have many serendipitous moments. Anyway, this book was very practical, filled with an enormous amount of information, all of which is very applicable on a day to day basis. This quote from Chris' blog sums it up quite nicely...
"You know those tech books you read and go 'yeah, this is all well and good, but would I ever REALLY do any of this in my work?' Well, this book isn't like that - it's nothing but real-world Flash design teachings for those of you who have already got past the basics, but want to take your work further, with creative, inspirational techniques."
Since my official job description is Web User Interface Designer / Developer, I figured it would be right up my alley. I chimed in with a comment on his blog post regarding this book, and he was nice enough to send me a review copy. It was written by a trio of talented Flash guys: Michael Kemper, Guido Rosso and Brian Monnone. What I like is that while this series is geared towards Flash, it covers fundamentals that are essential to any sort of visual or graphic design.
Like any book, it starts with an overview of the topic, pointing out some of the benefits of Flash, while also acknowledging a few of its drawbacks. They are quick to point out that long loading times and inaccessible content are a stigma which Flash is helping to overcome. Loading times can be avoided through smart planning of content (ala Ajax, loading things as needed) and Flash can actually be used to add sub-titles to video and such.
Chapters two through five focus on user experience, color theory, interface design and vector drawing. The content therein could be used for a design class as a textbook. Seriously, it's that good. Also, I like the way the book is planned out. Most of it is black and white, with figures that are contained in a color section. This is a great compromise between keeping printing costs low, while not missing out on some design nuance, because there are color pages too.
Chapters six and seven delve more into the Flash interface itself, covering advanced uses of the timeline and layers, and showing how to use Flash for vector drawing. In the past, these tools were considered to be sub-par, but as of version 8 it has really come into its own for creating non-destructive effects. These same effects can also be manipulated, created and removed with ActionScript. It should be noted that there is also a fair bit of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop techniques covered, throughout the entirety of the book.
Chapter 8 was a departure into the realm of video, talking about the various codecs that can be used. It also showed how to do green screen effects with Apple Final Cut Pro. Once you have isolated the video clips you want to make use of, they can then be taken into the Flash environment for seamless integration with your site's interface. Think of Adobe's own site, which has many full-motion video narrators who walk you through their varying content.
While Flash's forte is vectors, occasionally you will find yourself needing pixel-precision. Chapters 9 and 10 are about achieving this with Photoshop, and how to make raster (bitmap) images with the smallest footprints. This is usually done by exporting PNG files with the correct amount of compression and opacity. One of the nice things about Flash is that IE6 has no problem rendering PNG opacity when used in conjunction with Flash. Many of you CSS guys will know what a headache this is to do otherwise, using inelegant GIF files.
The last few chapters cover creating animated effects, Flash textures, and finishing off a site. They cover some nice tweening and transformation effects, and also show how to make water textures with distortion filters and a background image. If you've seen water in games like Unreal Tournament, you will know what I'm talking about. The final chapter covers attention to detail that will make the difference between good work and great work. It teaches how to sweat the small stuff, without being too much of a perfectionist.
My one and only complaint is that this book focused so heavily on Illustrator, when Fireworks is perhaps a more seamlessly integrated tool, and many people who have purchased Studio 8 for Flash and Dreamweaver already have it bundled. Nevertheless, many of the concepts carry over to whatever graphics program you prefer. All in all, this is a very strong title and a must-have for those who do a lot of cross-disciplinary work or just want to branch out into another aspect of web design. I like to think of Flash as SWAT - You don't call `em in for just anything, but it's great when you really need high impact.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book for designers/developers, July 6, 2006
This review is from: AdvancED Flash Interface Design (Advanced Design) (Paperback)
When i first got this book, I didn't really know what to expect. I didn't know if it was going to be a design book or an animation book for interfaces. I guess what I eventually ended up getting was a little bit of both.
The early chapters of the book are definitely not "AdvancED", but give some good insight on some topics that are normally overlooked. The one problem with this book is that it was trying to fit information about a lot of combined programs, such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. However, this HAS to be done because of the way Flash interfaces are designed these days, so as a downfall it can be excused because sometimes it is unavoidable (and sometimes very handy) to know how to use all those programs.
There is a chapter on colors which is great, but the end of the chapter (page 56) talks about the Color class. The Color class is deprecated as of Flash 8 and I wish they would have went more in depth on using the new classes in 8, such as ColorTransform and the likes.
Now that we've got the negatives out of the way, it's time to cover all the very formidable positives that this book has to offer. It has great explanations in every chapter of how to deal with good user experience and interface design. It's obvious that the authors (award winners in this subject) know what they are talking about. For instance, on a personal level, I hate bringing in graphics into Flash from Illustrator and seeing all the miscellaneous graphic symbols that it makes while importing. Some people don't clean this up in the library and it's VERY frustrating to see all those symbols and have to go in and clean them up. These guys stress highly the importance of a clean library and have a great section in chapter 7 that shows how to clean these graphics up. I can't tell you how many times I'd wished that people who work with me could make nice, clean libraries before they hand files over to me, but sometimes thats too much to ask for.
There is a chapter that makes mention of video and the best part about this chapter, after having recently made a project for AT&T that used Flash video, is the fact that it makes mention of the Flash 8 Video Encoder that comes bundled with Flash 8 Professional. It's a stand alone application and nobody in my office actually knew what it was or how to use it (which for a large company such as I work for could be a bit mind boggling). They take you through the encoder and show you example usage, which is VERY handy when working with encoding FLV files. This chapter also boasts a great explanation (which I actually wish I had read before looking like a fool in an initial project meeting) of the video playback options that Flash has to offer (Streaming, Progressive, and Embedded video).
The middle of the book has a great color pullout (it's not really a pullout, but ya know...) that demonstrates examples from the book and coincides with the color chapter (since obviously you want to see colors in a color chapter...). Chapter 9 is also an outstanding chapter which takes you from start to finish on how to design an interface in Photoshop (and 10 follows up with the proper way to import it into Flash so that you can work with those graphics). There is a section in this chapter titled "Moving from Photoshop to Flash" (pg. 232) which is a HUGE bonus. EVERYONE in the world who is a Flash designer/developer should convert graphics in the way that is described in this section. It saves a lot of time and headaches later on when you use the process outlined here.
Overall, the book was a treat. It started off a bit slow but definitely picked up a lot of momentum by the end. I'd definitely recommend it to someone who normally takes graphics from programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop and brings them into Flash. Conversely, I'd recommend it to designers who design for Flash developers as there is a lot of good information to learn from here.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Interesting Book, May 26, 2006
This review is from: AdvancED Flash Interface Design (Advanced Design) (Paperback)
There are plenty of Flash books out there to show you how to work with XML, scripting complex animations, learning Object-Oriented techniques, using components, etc. but there are only a few that deal with interface design.
This book deals with design in a very cool way - walking you through color theory, some mild 3D, shooting and using video, lots of photoshop design techniques, general rules of thumb for good UI and design, etc.
The book really deals with visuals over code, so this is perfect for those who don't need to be burdened with lots of coding to get the results they want.
I've been designing interfaces, sites, applications, etc. for quiet some time, and I was able to refresh some of my own thinking by reading through each chapter.
A chapter called "Flash Textures" dives into BitmapData in a nice way, I wish that chapter would have been a bit longer. Its one of the new things in Flash 8 that isn't always easy to get one's head around, especially when it comes to different kinds of animation one would like to generate with it.
I might have my own techniques to get things done, and the book doesn't present material in a way to make me feel like if its not done per the book, it's incorrect thinking. Its very open in that way which I like (not preachy).
This is the first FriendsofED book I've seen with a color section - and its wonderful :) I can easily see another book coming out of this from different designers... something like Flash Interface Design 2.
In all, a very solid book thats nice to look at and isn't heavy on code. The Photoshop techniques are useful for those who may be a little new to using it for anything other than photo retouch, etc. I like this book a lot, and I'll keep it in the side pile of books on my desk (if a book ends up in my bookcase, it means I won't use it). I like this one.
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