Very few designers will disagree that designing in Flash, especially concerning layout, is very fluid and user friendly. Your early ventures into designing in Flash often leave you wondering, “ Just why do I have to click so much to simply select an object and the stroke around it?” and “Why does dragging to select something make cuts into one object or another?” There are quite a few things in Flash that will catch a seasoned designer off guard. Understandably, ease of use does come with time and practice, but there’s a shortcut.
Enter Flash’s sister product, Macormedia’s Fireworks. Everyone should be accustomed to the look and feel of Fireworks. If not, the learning curve should be quick coming from Photoshop or any other graphics programs. Fireworks will export the file as a .SWF file, but the great thing here is, you can do all your motion tweening in Fireworks, save the file as the standard Fireworks PNG and Flash will import everything, the animations, the library, and even button states and it does a better job of compressing the final published product than Fireworks.
To do this, all you have to do is select your object then go to Modify>Symbol>Convert to Symbol or hit F8. Similar to Flash right? The three Flash symbols are all there too, graphic, button and animation. Once you have your symbol in the library, creating a button is very similar to that of Flash. Double clicking the symbol on the canvas will bring up the botton states (Up, Over, Down and Active Area).
As far as animation/motion tweening goes it’s very simple. Convert your object to a graphic symbol. Find your starting point in the animation, and find your ending point. Place the symbol at both points making sure the symbol representing the ending point is on a layer above the symbol for the starting point. Select both instances of the symbol and go to Modify>Symbol>Tween Instances… or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T. At this point it will ask you how many steps you want this use to get from starting point to end point and it also ask you if you want the tween to be distributed to multiple frames. Basically it’s asking, how many instances of the symbol do you want to use to create the motion tween and if you want to do it all on one frame or to create the frames necessary so that it’s only one instance per frame. One instance per frame is ideal and it’s great for making animated gifs and for importing animation into Flash. Choosing not to distribute to frames create some interesting effects that we will discuss in later issues.
And, as I said earlier, I’d love for you guys to write in (scott@designnewz.com) with questions, suggestions and comments. I’d love to devote a section in each newsletter to answering the questions you are really concerned about.
Scott Harris a former graphic designer for murdok and currently the design manager for C.A.D. Website Design and RSStatic
