I’d like to start by thanking Inspiredology for sending me to the Flash in the Can (FITC) conference in San Francisco. You not only gave me a ticket, but you gave me an unmatched insight into what little I knew about Flash.

Now, please note that I was a skeptical design student amongst a sea of hardcore developers. Flash, to me, was a tool for making silly little animations in the early 2000’s, and was a poor excuse for a video embedding tool on the web. With the advent of HTML5 and as a web designer, I thought Flash was on its way out. However, having barely touched it myself, I knew little about its full capabilities.

At the conference, I got to see some awesome implementations of Flash, such as Jared Ficklin’s sound visualizations and Erik Natzke’s “ribbon” art. These guys aren’t just developers – they’re true artists using code as their medium. Ficklin’s projections were absolutely amazing and intriguing – yay science!! And Natzke’s ribbon art was stunningly beautiful, much like paintings. These implementations suggested to me that Flash was not dying but instead was simply morphing into having a different purpose. Instead of being used as a tool for the web, it is a medium meant for art – art using code.

Perhaps my favorite (being a designer and all), though a bit off topic, was Scott Hansen’s presentation on his creative process. As a huge Tycho fan as well, it was highly interesting to see Scott pick apart one of his album covers layer-by-layer in Photoshop. I was also enthralled to know that Scott pulls his inspiration from the same sources I do, such as Herman Miller and anything from the 70’s.

Overall, I learned that Flash, though maybe a bit of a dying art in terms of web, is still a very capable tool for creating some really cool stuff. The conference also opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of making art with code, a medium I’d never really thought of before.

Thanks, Inspiredology!!

All photos are credited to the FITC Photo Stream on Flickr