How did you become a Flash Designer?

[An Artist]

I found out about Flash through a Webmaster course in colllege. I downloaded the 30 day free trial and started learning it. How about you?

[nordberg]

i had been developing cbt's in authorware for a couple years, and came across the gabocorp.com site (1998?). got my manager to order flash 2 that afternoon, and tried to reverse engineer gabocorp a week later. eventually, i migrated our whole business not only to flash, but online as well - and that's where it stands today.

[ViRGo_RK]

My brother actually found the demo, showed it to me, and I fell in love with it when I learned its true capabilities. From there, I purchased Flash 5 and started my learning experience.

[Louis van Laarhoven]

I was generating ideas how to build some education and others were building it in Flash 4. Then I thought: I wanna learn to build this myself.

[argonauta]

The company i used to work for wanted to hire a design company to do an online presentation for 12.000 USD. I told them I could do it for free if they buy me the software They did. It sucked but they fell in love with it and put me to do a lot of flash work. I also fell in love with flash, and kept going.

[vinitt jaiswal]

A company wanted me to do their online work. I looked at other animated websites they facinated me. I bought Flash 4 and since then its been my piece of cake.

[An Artist]

When I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Flash 4, I uploaded it to a server. A recruiter from Dice.com saw it and got me my first full time Flash job designing online greeting cards for a big company is New York City. That was a great job.

[Loyal Rogue]

A few years ago one of my wife's old clients wanted to redo his website and add a splash page.
She was going to sub it to the Flash developer from her old web company but he wanted $200/hr so I said screw that, downloaded the trial, found FK, followed some tutes, asked some questions and made it myself in about a week.

After that I was hooked and sold several Flash sites until I realized that they couldn't be optimized for search engines and started getting phonecalls for "Why isn't my site getting any traffic?".

Now we've gone back to good 'ole HTML sites with a little Flash here and there to spice 'em up.

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[An Artist]

um, did you just say $200/hr?

[Adobemedia]

Same as alot of people. Saw a flash site, fell in love with it the moment I touched the trial.

[indivision]

grew up programming and making vector animations on the Amiga. flash combined those two worlds. started working with it for fun. someone came across my personal site and offered me a job. havent had a free weekend since.

[mr_malee]

started making games with click teams "The Games Factory" and after frustration about not being able to use decimals and only whole numbers I searched for other programs and came across flash, it allowed decimal points and opened up a whole new range of ideas and possibilities, never looked back.

[swak]

Not sure how I found flash. I guess I just came upon it somehow. I haven't done it for any real jobs or anything like that but I just wanted to get a start with some sort of a job that would interest me and programming is that job. I wanted something where I could attach code to the objects and stuff like that. I'm now learning Java and I'm liking it because I irritates the heck out of me that there is no real way to save information to the hard-drive with flash. By the way, is there a way to have flash communicate with java?

[enpstudios]

I needed to have a website for my cellular phone consulting business, started with MS Frontpage and Photoshop 5. Saw Flash5 and fell in love !!

[stumpy]

I got sucked into a Tron like vortex but with better graphics and cooler software. There I was set free to try to stay alive and have fun doing it.

So there I was... in a strange earth like place, forced to design for the life of me and my family, I became quizzical about the things around me and one day flash stopped in for a beer and there you have it. Grapic design and Flash Media...and JesterTerrestrial. WOW eh!

[jasonsplace]

The web developer at the company my mom worked for gave me the Flash 3 trial...or maybe it was 4 but I really think it was 3. He told me that he was hooked on it and thought that i'd really like it. That was a long time ago...

[PAlexC]

I was hired to develop e-Learning in Director...turns out they meant Flash in the job description. *shrug*

[luvenny]

I was making a break-up CD.

[laxmi19885]

my boss offered me : flash or quit.

[Frets]

$200 an hour was easy money back in the early days. I can recall scratch sites going for $2,000 done in 8 hours.

Today the flash market has changed. There are still those who can demand and are worth the big bucks.


There are flash desingers on every street corner-
Just because someone can use flash it doesn't make them good at it.
Clients, and content modifiers whom can't differeniate between great,
good, and poor visual design will eventually get what they deserver or want but not necessarily what the need. Eventually being a result of communication
or lack there of by the client and the designer.

Template builders are the true flash designers of today. Those whom purchase them are content modifiers/sales people. A good template is a modest and wise investment compared to the time it takes to design from scratch and can be done in a few hours (2-3) It's fast cash for the modifier and returning money for the template seller / designer. In a respectable organization (Like Flash Foundry) somehow between the template designer the seller and the template modifier it all works out to be profitable for all. If the designer is worth his salt