10 Problems Only Graphic And Web Designers Will Understand
4. Flash Is Dead. Long Live Flash!
In a digital photo, every single pixel is assigned a color. This means the bigger the photo, the more colors assigned, and the bigger the file size. In the old days of dial-up, you needed to optimise photos and shrink them down to around 25-40KB each. If the image size is doubled, the pixels expand, leading to pixilation (a very bad-looking photo). Flash is vector-based, which means that a pixel can be defined as one color, then the instructions for that color can be extended until it hits a pixel of a different color. This saves considerably on file size. The Flash file can also expand to fill the entire screen without losing visual integrity. For print designers, Flash was a way to get their artistic visions onto web pages, while protecting their work (at least in the early days) from being stolen. For web designers, its timeline-based capacity enabled interaction between the animation and the user. And with the increase in broadband, streaming video was incorporated. Then came web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, and his article, Flash: 99% Bad, which ripped the formats ability to define its own navigation separate from that of the browser. Then Apple guru Steve Jobs (in)famously declared that Flash was unwelcome on the iPhone and iPad, so browsers began to block Flash on sites. Click-per-page sites didnt like it because it was a self-contained package, and hackers began to use it as a malware vector. Today, Flash is still used for streaming video and some advertising. Its not dead yet, but you could say its on life-support.
