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Flash is Like Wasabi. Splash Pages are Like Wasabi. Well, Everything is Like Wasabi.

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | November 19, 2007

adobe flash splash pages

Several years ago, I was sitting around with my wife at a Chinese diner on Long Island. Nervous to start a conversation, I played with my sushi on the plate and on a separate bowl. I poured a lake of sauce that was held at bay from my ginger by a dam of wasabi. I related to her that I enjoyed the rush of wasabi as I put it in my mouth.

“Me too!” she exclaimed.

This started a no-holds-barred session of taking small clumps of wasabi and putting them in our mouths to check out the rush that would inevitably ensue. Glob after glob of wasabi, the rush got more and more intense. It was a really cool experience.

This is, until several hours later, when I was sick to my stomach from all of the wasabi that I had ingested. I didn’t sleep for much of that night. I felt horrible, and wasn’t able to really focus on any of the details of that evening.

I tell you this, not only to share an embarrassing tidbit about myself, but to make an allusion to Flash and Splash pages. When we design things, there is a tendency to get out the latest technologies to try and make the coolest things possible. Without intention, however, those things are just that – things. With no nutritional content whatsoever.

Some of the best sites on the internet go unnoticed because of the overuse of a specific technology on a Splash page. Excessive intros can frustrate a user. Music can annoy even the most intense music fan.

I believe that Flash and Splash pages should be designed to do one of two things:
(1) To inform a reader about key things on the site in the shortest amount of time.
(2) To foster a level of professionalism, curiosity, and wonder that compels a person to want to invest the time to learn more about the site.

If your use of Flash or your design of a Splash page does not fit into one of these two categories, you are likely to have people that will bail on your site, or press the “Skip” button, making all of the hours that you spent creating that cool spinning logo completely irrelevant.

Now, there are amazing designers out there that can create amazing Flash that inspires the kind of wonder that will MAKE you want to check out their stuff. Red Interactive is a site where they have used Flash to create this world which you can interact with. It’s a total time killer, but it makes you want to look around and explore its surroundings. By doing so, you learn a little about who they are. It works because it hooks you with wonder. That, I feel, is great use of technology. But you don’t have to be a Flash genius to do this.

I’ll give you something simpler. When I was looking for a photographer for a wedding, I browsed and backed out of tons of sites with the longest of intros. The one site that made me stop and look was Michael Cuttone over at Captured in Time Photography. Michael used Flash in the simplest way possible – a slideshow. The slideshow showed some really cool photography and conveyed to me exactly what he wanted me to think, in seconds. I was left with one thought, “Yeah, this is the kind of photography I want for this event”. Any marketing messages, cool catchphrases, or pitches would have just turned me off as hype. His work spoke to me, and because of that I wanted to listen to what he had to say. He had earned my time to stay on his site.

Walking the line between cool design and useful design is an indepth study in Usability. Two people that I continuously go to for things like this are Steve Krug, with his book “Don’t Make Me Think” and Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. Before you put a mouse to Dreamweaver, I encourage you to take a look at the usability of what you are working on. You can save yourself some time in design, make a greater impact with your website, and avoid a really bad stomach ache from the big green monster.

While you guys are here, check out the following tutorials in the field of designing web sites:

Graffiti Like Website Layout
Creating a Navigation Bar with CSS

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