Ode To The Flash Banner

An Ode to the Flash banner.

The Flash banner revolutionised digital advertising. For over a decade it practically dominated the internet, from Flash banners to full Flash website experiences. It was a designers dream to create with it. Anything was possible.

Sadly on December 31st 2020, Adobe officially ended support for Flash, and the mainstream browsers have removed the Flash plugins. Thus killing off this once great platform. All good things eventually come to an end. Flash has paved the way for a more structured internet, more streamlined HTML5, and other faster running open source code.

I managed to screen record a select few of my banner designs, as I put many hundreds of hours of work into them. These are now little nuggets of art to me.

See below a little video ode I made in memory of the Flash banner.

I spent 10 years, a large chunk of my life working pretty much solidly with Adobe Flash. Lots of it was building eye-catching Flash banners for various brands. Each one telling a little story of it's own... all in 15 seconds.

Advertising generally has a short shelf life, the digital banner had a very very short shelf life. Alive for just a single day in many cases. Now so many of my banner builds are now forever forgotten and lost in time.

The banner designs ranged from simple animation to full actionscript coded interactions and user triggers. many headaches were had, but the end result was always worth the effort.

The digital designer of today will never understand or experience this level of craft. A web banner is now too small of a prize for their worth.

I'll cherish the golden years of Flash. May these banners never be forgotten.