Anime Dreams

Flash animations, Photoshop tricks, cartooning, and graphics fun

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We usually try way too hard to come up with impressive Flash. We spend hours trying to orchestrate really complex movements, and generally end up tearing our hair out just to come up with a cartoon or anime that will WOW the customer, or our friends and family.

That's certainly okay, and we should be proud of the skills we've developed to be able to create knock your socks off Flash animations. At the same time, it pays to remember that the best magic is invisible. By that I mean that the vast majority of the people that view your final product are not Flashaholics. They don't know how hard you had to work to produce what they see and hopefully enjoy. And, very frankly, they don't care. They only want to be entertained and surprised.

I learned that lesson the hard way last Christmas when I created several different Flash Christmas card animations. Boy was I surprised, and disappointed, when it turned out that the one everyone liked the most was my simpliest, most straight forward attempt - and the one that only took a very short time to throw together.

And the one that I had poured hours and hours of hard work into - how did it fare? Well, they said "That's nice..." but I could tell that they just weren't all that impressed.

So, what did they really, really like? An extremely simple transformation and rotation Flash animation created using SwishMax. A red circle, the Japanese flag symbol, appears then rotates faster and faster until it eventually transforms into a spinning Santa. That's it.

I could have been depressed, or frustrated that they really didn't understand... But I wasn't. My goal from the beginning, and all they way through the development process was to provide my customers with something that would satisfy THEM, not ME. It was that simple. Now when I start working on a new project I always try to look at it from the customer's perspective. How will it solve HIS or HER problems? How will it please and delight them?

And I have tried to make it a habit to keep my designs much, much simplier. It seems to be working, and working a whole heck of a lot better than before.

Posted by Lem on November 2, 2005 | Permalink

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