I basically started the design for my new site (which should be coming up soon, btw) with the animation and built it from that. The small snippet of a picture of my screen is a bit of a teaser for the new site, and you might notice that I’m rebranding the site to my own name. While I enjoy the Bit by Bit name and the whole duality of it and stuffs, I felt this makes more sense as a personal portfolio website. Hopefully Google agrees, and I will no longer see my friend, Andy Mangold, ranked higher than me for my own name.

Despite digressing into a promotion of my redesign, I would like to point out some of what I consider to be the finer uses of Flash. It is most definitely a powerful tool, and likely something that can impress visitors, but it can also be overwhelming and distracting. By using Flash to introduce movement to your site in a sublte way, you can maintain a clean aesthetic and add just a little bit more to the site. It also allows the Flash to degrade nicely to a static image and continue to look great for all those (few remaining these days) that don’t have Flash installed.

I don’t think anything turns me off more when I visit a website on my iPhone to see half the design missing because I don’t have Flash installed.

Previously, browsers would often group the navigation elements with tabs and have the website floating below or have the website grouped in a tab with the navigation elements floating above. This shift marks a change in UI that I think just plain makes sense. Hopefully Firefox and IE aren’t far to follow in this trend.