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What is Flash Advertising?

Banner Advertising: What is the best workflow for creating Standard Flash and Rich Media ad units?

  • I've been making banners for 6 years and Flash elements for websites for 11 but have recently considered ways to optimize our current design and development process.  Currently Strategy-->Concept-->Design (layered comps for every size)-->Development-->QA-->Trafficking.  I guess the big question is design frames and art in Photoshop or Illustrator or design straight in Flash?

  • Answer:

    I think the reason designers start with Photoshop or AI for banners is the same reason that directors use storyboarding for commercials or films... You wouldn't really use a video camera to convey your idea to a client... you'd block out the action in still form first. It's quicker, cheaper and allows for revisons before you invest the time into the motion. That said, I think designers should build their comps to be as flash-friendly as possible... and Adobe should tighten the integration between photoshop and flash, or give flash a storyboarding feature. (however given flash is used for so much more than banners, that probably will never happen) As someone who designs then builds their own flash banners, I agree its a lot of work!

Paula Grech at Quora Visit the source

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The workflow described matches what I've done at various agencies. Designers generally prefer to build comps in Photoshop so we're used to that. Layer comps are ideal as banner storyboards. I can imagine it would be more efficient for someone who is both designer and developer to do the whole thing in Flash. In an agency, that work is split between multiple people. The designer is often doing banners as just one part of a campaign that leverages the same design approach across print, web, and mobile, so Flash wouldn't make sense as the design tool in that case. Maybe it's a good thing that the design phase is abstracted away from Flash, but it's not really efficient to be recreating Photoshop filters in Flash and trying to match bitmap gradients in vectors.

Brad Johnson

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