Hello, I just purchased Flash CS3 for a project that I will be starting. I need to make a banner with a navigation. I was wondering if there are any tutorial sites that show this step by step? i have looked on google but could not find any that showed me, a beginner, how to do every step and where everything is. Thanks,
I was in your shoes and found http://www.lukamaras.com (sepcifically I ran into this page: http://www.lukamaras.com/tutorials/banners/mesmerizing-effect-banner.html ) This guy does Flash for a living and decided to make tutorials which I found quite easy to follow 99% of the time. What's extra nice is he explains what happens and why, so it complimented my stupid Flash in 24 Hours book (which isn't bad but doesn't seem structured for me). What's nice is you can combine techniques, so you're not stuck making his banners at all. What I found most useful was making clickie buttons (since I was making banners after all. All that said, try to use animated gifs whenever possible. They're smaller files, play on everyone's computer (so long as they have images enabled-- if they don't, they sure as hell won't have Flash enabled), and are just as clickable (although I believe with Actionscript you can have a changing banner with multiple URLs depending on when the user clicks, though I don't know how to do this).
Stomme, You mentioned that animated buttons are smaller file sizes than flash. Would the same be said for animated banners? I'm concerned that flash doesnt appear on all machines, but then animated banners can also be huge sizes. Thankz fuzz
In general, a gif will be smaller than a Flash file. This isn't always true, since a gif with 50 layers/frames can be quite big! And there are techniques to reduce the size of a Flash file (mostly, reusing Objects as much as possible and not saving as a Graphic as much as you can do more with movie objects). It does depend on the files themselves. Sometimes Flash just looks so much better than it's obvious which to use. That said, if you use the Satay method of embedding (using only <object> tags) you can always have an animated gif as a child of the object-- if the Flash doesn't appear, the animated gif will. With Alt text behind that! : ) http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay The disadvantage of this is that IE6 will ask you "Click to Continue Loading this Page" and usually people get around THAT by using a Javascript loader (seems SWFObject is the most popular out there). Again, you can have an animated gif underneath for those without Flash. Another article of interest: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/byebyeembed/ So, what I've done (although not everyone has the time for this) is have both versions of the banner in question. If the FLash is larger but looks soooo much better then I'll use the Flash, while if the quality is mostly the same and the Flash is larger I chuck it. Of course, if you need extras like different frames clicking to different URLs you'll need Flash (or Javascript) for that as Actionscript can set a different button for different clips while an animated gif can only go to a single URL. There are optimisation techniques for animated gifs as well, mostly also reusing as much of the previous frame as possible and generous use of either transparency or single colours (transparency is considered a colour as far as gifs are concerned). Esp if the colours are in horizontal rows (obviously that has to come second to design, but it's something to keep in mind), as gifs remember themselves and are encoded in rows. The more of a row and the more rows that are a single colour, the smaller the file. So a top-to-bottom gradient in the background will affect filesize in a better way than a left-to-right gradient, while a single backgorund colour can beat them both. You'll have to play with it to find out what's best.