Identifying an ongoing art movement is difficult. Until the movement assumes a clear character, it becomes difficult to identify its defining aspects. Following this philosophy, we can say that Flash aesthetic has matured enough for identification and examination.

Certain elements of Flash design and Flash animated presentation have undergone changes because Flash reinforces some features of animation and makes other even more complex. Flash aesthetic was born, when strategies used to handle the strong and weak points of Flash were transported to other media.

Flash aesthetic possesses various elements that differentiate it from conventional cell-animations. In this article, we will discuss four issues – Scaling, Heavy Strokes, 2-D style, and Motion without Cycles.

Scaling

Traditional cell animations opt for layers of graphics on a film to create background and foreground characters. In traditional animation, experts usually avoided modifying size of a character developed for the foreground because it demanded excessive time. More specifically, to increase size of the character, one had to re-draw the element from scratch.

With Flash, however, re-sizing an element is simple. You need to click once and drag. Therefore, it can be confidently said that Flash technology has simplified the process of re-sizing and modifying an element.

Heavy Strokes

Most of us have noticed thick outlines that enclose various elements of Flash movies. However, have you ever wondered about the reason behind it? These thick outlines appear because of poor resolution of standard monitors.

Flash designers use these outlines to highlight the elements into the visual center and front. This visual emphasis helps a person, who is using the standard monitor (and sitting less than 2 feet from the screen) in separating the background from the foreground.

In traditional animation, these thick outlines hardly appear. The reason is that in this situation, viewers sit at a great distance from the screen. Each pixel takes up limited space, this contributing to the enhanced resolution of the images.

2D Style

Flash aesthetic is relaunching 2D animation once again. Flash movies now contain flat animations that lack shadow layer. While creating various types of 2D illustrations, experts utilize the shadow layer for lifting an element from its background.

 In computer-based animation, realistic shadow layers opt for alpha channels. Alpha channels enable shadows to mix in with the background.

 However, alpha channels come with a disadvantage. In conventional method, to highlight a flat graphic, the computer has to select colors of respective pixels.

However, with alpha channels, the computer has to take help of percentage of original background and current image for calculating degree of alteration of current color base of the pixel. Now, this needs to be completed for every updated pixel. This is a demanding and time-consuming task.

To solve this problem, animation experts are now taking help of Flash aesthetic. They now simply convert the Flash movie into a constant stream of video graphics. This takes care of the calculation part. Once the video file is developed, alpha layers fail to affect the playback rate. This is because the movie has already been flattened. The computer does not need to calculate anymore!

Motion without Cycles

The fourth aspect of Flash aesthetic is motion without cycles. In conventional animation, characters assume a proper motion, while walking. However, in Flash aesthetic, they drift across the screen. This technique reduces work load of the animator as well as download time of the file.

 The above discussion highlights the fact that Flash aesthetic is well-equipped to handle the weaknesses of Flash technology. We believe that this visual movement will soon affect print advertising and fine art. What is your opinion about this issue? Tell us.