the Good Flash site

Smashing Magazine has an absolutely fascinating article on Usability Findings for websites– not specifically Flash, but many Flash designers would do well to pay a bit more attention to usability!

Check it out here.

Erik Hallander

Erik Hallander’s portfolio is more understated than the previous two. Nothing here spins or stretches or moves at all when you enter the main page. The smooth activation of the menu rollovers comes, then as a nice surprise, as does the simple, yet very elegant functionality of the portfolio list.

Click on an item and you see why the site made it to Design M.ag’s list: a cool “Pixelating” effect transitions the main image. Very nice.

Get the look yourself

On his blog, Erik is kind enough to share the class that he built to create this effect. What a great guy! Here’s the link.

Switch Mediaworks

Man, as soon as you enter this site you know they’ve gone for broke. The preloader is cool; the light switching on (with a few particles falling) is cool; the way the menu items shift into place like pieces from a tile sliding game is cool; the way the text scrolls through the letters until it settles on the right one is a bit cliche, but still cool. The clouds gently drifting over the map of where to find them… that is really cool.

Again, it’s little touches that carry a site from “pretty good” to “pretty great”. Switch Mediaworks have put so many of these touches into their portfolio that there can be no question… it’s a great site.

Get the look yourself

There’s no way around it– to get this look takes a lot of work. Here are a couple of stock flash items that could get you started in the right direction:

Flashden has this portfolio site that has some real similarities to Switch’s site; it’s editable with XML and costs only $30.

Flashden also has the random scrolling text effect available for only $5.