Many Flash books only cover the nuts and bolts of creating Flash animations. This is fair enough, as Flash can be difficult to grasp at first, but theres another dimension thats addressed by this book. Flash Web Design - the art of motion graphics covers the design aspects of putting together striking Flash-based animations.

The books author is Hillman Curtis of hillmancurtis.com. You may not have heard the name, but if youve ever visited Macromedias site youll have seen his work. His company was responsible for the 1998 www.macromedia.com redesign: the one with circles everywhere that has remained basically unchanged since.
At the heart of the book are eight detailed examinations of successful Flash animations, created by hillmancurtis.com and other award-winning companies. These range from the relatively simple animated Macromedia Shockzone logo to movies containing vectorised video clips. In each case, the purpose of the animation was to publicise something; the interactive and scripting capabilities of Flash 4 arent explored in great depth.

Curtis covers his four-step design process and discusses how he comes up with concepts for his animations. Each of the featured animations is then re-constructed using a step-by-step process, suggesting that it should be possible to learn by recreating them. Unfortunately, the book doesnt include a CD-ROM containing the resources used for the original animations, so youre unable to do this. Curtis also describes using FreeHand, Adobe Premiere and Sound Forge during the step-by-step process, so users of other tools will get less out of it.

This books real value is as a source of design ideas. In a sense, this makes it even more important than the raft of how to Flash books on the market. After all, given patience, learning how to use Flash is just a technical challenge. Learning to design eye-catching animations that work is another matter altogether, and this book offers a valuable insight into the mind of an acknowledged leader in the field.

Curtis book is a natural next step for anyone whos mastered the basic foundations of putting together animations and is looking for design guidance, tips and tricks. If it has the effect of reducing the number of bloated, ever-so-clever Flash animations, it will have served its purpose. In the words of the author, The motions the message. Lean and mean.... Kick it out. Couldnt have put it better myself.

Kevin Partner