Flash Critique

One type of Flash that I found find well done and effective was the site at: http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com/. This site serves as the perfect introduction to new Flash users on the interactive capabilities this program has to offer. The whimsical motion of the font and objects that can be manipulated, san serif font (which is appropriate for brief lines of text, suitable for this site), bright contrasting colors, and overall composition was aesthetically pleasing, comprehensive, and simplistic in design. Each page shows unity, a standard form of layout of the page’s components, but the object that the viewer can maneuver is of course different in appearance, capability, and design from page to page.

Normally Flash takes a long time to load, but on this particular site, users will find generally now problem at all in viewing the content, which is a huge plus. In other websites, Flash has become more of a headache, as vital information shown via video and Flash animation becomes consistently interrupted by sporadic pauses. Though Flash sites are often not always intuitive, this site took extra care to label navigation buttons as well as adequate directions on how to use the site and “test” some of the features Flash has to offer. I believe this site’s ability to make hands-on learning of Flash possible is exemplary of our current Web’s evolution to Web 2.0. The only area that needs improvement, however, is the scroll bar. I, at first, found this difficult to differentiate, as it shown as a small rectangle in the corner, while the remaining bar matches the background perfectly – making it easy to miss. This poses a possible user-interface issue, especially for someone who does not know spend much time on the Web to realize a scroll bar even exists.