Flashers Unite
By Molly E. Holzschlag
The only successful Web technology that has truly been developed with designers in mind is Flash. Or so I once wrote, only to find a virtual ton of passionate email in my inbox the next day. The responses were divided. Many found my comment not only controversial, but confusing, so I'd like to clarify how I came to this opinion.
First you have to look at the way contemporary designers have been trained. If you came to the Web from a visual design background within the last ten years or so, you're probably used to working with visual tools. The argument is really as simple as that. Flash is a visual tool. Markup, scripting, and other language-based technologies on the other hand, have few viable options when it comes to entirely visual editors.
What Designers Want
When I'm in designer mode, I don't even bother thinking Web. I open Illustrator, Quark, or Photoshop (or all three) and use these tools to help me achieve all of the things designers want. Illustrator lets me work with complex shapes and integrate type into a design. Photoshop is the consummate tool for working with graphic elements and tapping into the power of history and layers to give my work flexibility. Quark lets me refine layout, and work with margins, text placement, text flow, and white space.
Designers will be very familiar with this trio of tools, or a similar grouping including FreeHand, PageMaker or InDesign, or CorelDraw. Whatever the tools, designers using them can create unusual and interesting layouts without thinking of the constraints that markup imposes.
