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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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The last section of the guide demonstrated how you can build your Flash design up from regions of content called blocks. Blocks demonstrate the overall placement of content in a movie. What keeps and attracts users to your movie, however, is a cohesive image constructed from the blocks of content. This is called branding.

Branding is a combination of color, images, and text. Branding visually presents the message your company wants your customers to feel when they reach your site. Yes, I said "feel." Unlike programming, branding is a perceptible experience that is not measured in 1's and 0's.

Where Do You Start?

When I hear the word "brand," the first thing I think of is a company logo. Take Pepsi, for example. When someone mentions the word Pepsi, do you automatically picture the company's red, white, and blue circular logo? That's because a logo is central to a company's brand. Often times, a logo's color and text form the brand's very foundation. Consequently, when creating your own brand, you need to look at your logo as your starting point.

Let's look the company logo being used in this series. As a refresher, here is the company Web page design:

Figure 1

Now, let's zero in on the logo.

Figure 2

The logo is composed of two parts: the visual element on the left, and the company name. These two elements give you the color definition and text formatting you can use for your branding.

Using Color

The first thing any visitor to your site notices is its use of color. For branding purposes, you'll want to keep your color choice consistent, which means using only Web-friendly colors. When you publish your Flash movie, you have no idea whether it will be viewed on a Macintosh, Windows XP, or PDA computer. In addition, your Flash movie may only be part of an overall Web site design that mixes both Flash and Web elements into a single page.

Web-friendly colors solve this problem by ensuring that all colors look the same on all devices. Web-friendly colors are restricted to 216 different hexadecimal (HEX) combinations. This is limiting, but you're guaranteed that your presentation will appear identical on all major operating systems and Web devices.

An easy way to manage color in your movies is to create a color chart. For the fictional company used in this guide, the following colors are used for layout, text design, and background colors: white, dark gray, light gray, orange, and lime. These colors translate into the following HEX colors: FFFFFF, 999999, DADADA, DF8500, and ADD100.

Flash MX 2004 comes with a useful tool, called the Color Swatch panel, which allows you to manage color. If the Color Swatch panel isn't open by default, open it by selecting Window > Design > Color Swatches.

The Color Swatch Panel

The Color Swatch panel opens with the Flash Default color collection.

Figure 3

You can see that you have a collection of 216 colors. Along the bottom, you have a collection of gradients you can also use.

The main control that enables you to add and remove colors is located in the top right section of the screen. Selecting this will open a new menu:

Figure 4

Many graphics tools, such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks, can export collections of colors. This can be either a Color Table (ACT File) or Color Set (CLR File). The Color Table or Color Set can be imported into the Flash Swatch panel. This allows designers to share color charts across print, Web, and Flash design tools.

Another way to build your color set in Flash is to import a GIF image. Each and every GIF image has a color table constructed of the colors in the GIF image. You can use the color table from the GIF image in Flash. Here is a GIF image of the colors used in the branding of our demonstration site.

Figure 5

The following colors are added to my Color Swatch when I select to add colors with the GIF image:

Figure 6

Now, when I use text or draw an image, I'm restricted to using just these seven colors.

Using Images

The same discipline you use for basic colors must also be used with images and photographs. For instance, the main image of the demonstration design is constructed predominantly of the light gray and lime green color:

Figure 7

Here, the image is playful and the company tag line jumps out at you. In addition, images can also be used to re-enforce text. In the following example, the colors and the image of the woman behind the computer reinforce the message being delivered.

Figure 8

Branding Text

The final element of branding you'll want to consider with your design is the use of text type.

Typical Web design limits you to using only the following fonts: Arial, Times, Verdana, and Courier. Flash, however, allows you to embed a font into any movie you create. The potential for this is that you can use any font or style for each and every document you create.

This is not a good idea.

As with a color swatch, create a style sheet that you can use for your fonts. The logo for our demonstration site provides the foundation for the use of font style. Define the font face, boldness, and color and use it consistently.

Your brand represents your Flash movie's overall image, which is constructed from a consistent use of color, images, and text. With the right combination, you can make your brand as famous as Pepsi's.

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