Rosy

Let me start at the beginning. I first met the folks at Friends Of Ed after applying for a web design position.

Birmingham based Initiative urgently needs Master/Mistress of Flash
If youre currently moonlighting with Flash 4 but would love doing it full time... if your head is constantly bursting with ideas for headstopping Flash applications.... if you've got a Fine Arts degree... if you can write in a structured and persuasive style... if taking it all further with dynamic scripting in ActionScript and Perl, PHP, ASP, etc is a thrill and not a cause for panic....

If it's yes to some or all of the above, we could offer you a really rosy future. Get in touch today.

I fancied that rosy future. I sent them a short email that read

‘Hi, I don’t have a Fine Arts Degree, but I am a graduate, and I do have my own teeth and hair. I also have some URLs you might want to look at. Give me a bell and we can have a chat.’

… and ended the email with a short list of Flash 4 URLs. Don’t ask me where the teeth and hair bit came from, but it got me the interview.

As part of that interview, they let slip that it wasn’t actually a web design position at all. They were not really sure what the job was when questioned, but anyway, they asked me to think about it.

Richard Collins, the strategy manager at the time, had a well worn old bikers jacket on when he appeared at my interview. and he went on to become really animated when he talked about the web and the creative possibilities (rather than the just the technical or commercial or technical potential that was the more obvious angle back then). I thought about both these facts. The laid-back appearance and the genuine enthusiasm were just right for the manager of a new start-up. So that was enough thinking for me. I took the job.

That’s not so much an introduction of how I got to meet the Friends, more of a summary of the way they worked. The whole company had attitude, but they were also committed professionals with real aptitude. That same mix of attitude and aptitude went into New Masters of Flash. Informed chaos, blended with professionalism.

Anyway, I started by doing some consulting and Flash web design for the Friends, but ended up writing on a Flash book to help out in other areas. It did rather well, so I did more.

At the time (mid 2000) computer books were pretty much a known quantity. They were either written by programmers, or they were based on lecture notes. Design oriented Photoshop books were all over the place of course, but the computer book world didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That is probably an oversimplification that will get me into trouble, but I don’t think it was that far off. Of course, right now computer books that address design are the big growth area. But back then, there were no glossy computer books that were based on fashion magazine layouts, and certainly none that would look good resting on expensive furniture.

Nobody had really done this mixing code and design gig, so there were all sorts of problems....

We wanted to fill the book with innovators from the Flash underground rather than the first dozen or so cool sites we saw, and we didn’t want to use corporate sites. Thus, choosing the contributors took a serious amount of time.

Some of the contributors had not written before.

The book was expensive to make so costing was problematic.

The printing press didn’t understand the fact that this computer book would use heavy paper, so they used a cheaper binding appropriate for a normal computer book, and less than the one the Friends specified. The pages very occasionally fell out. We pulped the entire first print run. It didn't meet our expectations of quality. The book stores were not sure what we were trying to do and just looked at us and said "?".

The book got published.

The Flash conventions were using the New Masters of Flash author list as their most wanted speaker list. Other publishers were using the same list of authors as a poaching checklist. New Masters of Flash peaked well within the top 10 on the Amazon USA all-book chart. We kept running out of stock. We had used mad layouts that totally covered the pages in color. A reviewer complained about the smell of all that ink. We laughed.

New Masters of Flash took the Computer Book of the Year Award. A competitor was worried enough to have an intern writing bad reviews about us first thing every Monday morning.

Things were looking rosy.

Fast forward.

A few months ago, Gary Cornell gave me a call. He owns Apress, and now also Friends OF Ed (you will notice that both names are on the cover of this book). He wanted to know what my suggestions would be for future Friends books. I said Friends Of Ed is a design imprint. Even when he’s writing about programming, Ed should be design oriented. I said we need to do a third New Masters of Flash book as a priority.

Gary told me it was a difficult book, and people might not know the why of it in the new post dot­boom publishing industry. He said it was risky. I said publish it anyway. The ‘Ed’ in Friends Of Ed is supposed to mean whatever you want it to mean, but it mostly means ‘Every designer’. Ed needs to know the basics and standard advanced stuff, sure, but he also needs to know what other designers are doing out on the edge, away from the normal path.

You know the rest. Gary published the book. You’re holding it.

I know what will happen. We’ll see some people just not getting the why of it. They’ll bang on about this not being a proper computer book, or not a design book, or how <insert name> is missing from it, especially because they work for so and so studio, and they´ve got a great big blog.

Here´s my why. Design and programming go hand in hand. A book on Flash that doesn’t include both is a book that is stuck in the days of publications created from lecture notes. This book isn´t coming from there.

The contributors in this book are just like the book itself. They have the attitude and aptitude. They make their own rules and set their own agendas. Nobody showed them the right way. They just did it, and wondered why later.

They´re already famous, or about to get famous because of their attitude to their art. They’re worth reading about because of their aptitude for their art.

They´re the future of Flash. Rosy.

Sham B

April 2004

England.

...end quote.

Maybe I'm stating the obvious here... y'know what I think?

Web 2.0, Standards, webservices and Flash as an application platform, Windows presentation layer. It's all well and good. Um. But....

For us designers, the old stuff was so much more fun.

Comment by Colin Smith

Comment by Shamb