[omg_ketchup]

I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.

Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.

Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.

That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.

[rantanplan]

Out of 100 sites in flash, maybe 2 were the gems you describe. The remaining 98 were utter crap that should die in a fire.

The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.

[rch]

Except in that the people paying the designers would demand sites like the 98 horrible ones.

[happertiger]

And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how?

All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.

[jstanley]

> it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever.

My experience of flash is that it mostly didn't work, and I had to spend an hour after every new OS install trying to get flash to work.

And copy and paste doesn't work, you can't right click to save images, etc. Unless you're trying to make an animation, or a game, flash gives a really lame user experience, I don't know why you like it so much.

[robomartin]

The objective of most websites is not and should not be cool and interesting design, unless it happens to be a site about design.

At the end of the day a site is there to serve a purpose. And, generally speaking, that demands familiarity with the UI and ease of use. If every site demanded increased cognitive load from the user the internet would be a horrible place.

I get that designers want to design cool stuff. Love it. But when all the smoke and bull clears out the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information. Craigslist and good black and white movies prove that good and useful content is what people are after, not award-winning design and cool web tricks.

[omg_ketchup]

> the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information

But why? What about a site about art? What about a site about me? What if I don't want you to get "information" about me, but to see the world through my eyes, with the website as my lens? Sure, I guess I could post my non-interactive photos to Instagram, but that seems so... uniform.

Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive. And I'm not saying it's impossible to do in 2018. I'm just saying it was a much more creative-friendly experience 10 years ago, and when we killed Flash, we lost it.

We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.

[rchaud]

> Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive.

This is exactly how I remember the best Flash sites of the 2000s. They weren't creating interactives to drive some lead gen campaign, or sell their blockchain-based SaaS or whatever; it was made purely because it was cool and fun to use. Some portfolio websites for UI and FE developers still have this feel.

> We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.

I get the sarcasm, but IMO, I'd rephrase and say "We did gain Codepen". Lots of cool visual stuff there, but I guess it would be mostly of interest to developers, and not the wider public. Still, I see stuff in Codepen daily that would never make it into a "production environment" because it didn't fit the CMS template, it wasn't responsive, or was using new tech like CSS Grid, or a multitude of the other reasons why websites stopped being cool.

[beaconstudios]

not OP, but I think the fundamental difference is design vs art. Designing for use will drive you to create a site similar to what's out there. Creating art for expression leaves you plenty of room to communicate the aesthetic, mood and so on that you want to share.

[robomartin]

I believe I did cover your scenario when said there was an exception if the site is about design. If showcasing art, design or a specific personality is the objective then usability might have to take secobd fiddle, and that’s fine.

[acheron]

"Did you click on the squid?" http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03

[tim333]

Reminds me of the only flash site I really liked, jimcarrey.com. Shame it's down now. Though somewhat preserved in video eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QzhEZnOYE4

[tokyodude]

I'm not disagreeing that flash was easier but are you sure it isn't just you got jaded? The things you though were cool 20 years ago in Flash just aren't as cool?

I googled "cool websites" and these came up

https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design...

don't know if any of those do anything for you. I'm too lazy to look for more but I feel like they are out there.

[rchaud]

The nature of how we browse the web has fundamentally changed since the days when Flash was king. What is the point of investing in a gorgeous website if the audience has moved over to FB/Twitter/Insta and are now acclimatized to scrolling through endless content feeds for a slight hit of dopamine.

By Googling "cool sites", you've stumbled upon the crux of the issue. The site that ranks at the top is the SEO-optimized, but incredibly cookie-cutter, template-heavy Awwwards, which is a back-patting congratulatathon of creative directors at design agencies. So of course the websites featured are their own.

I'm sure at some point they wanted to feature real client websites, but chances are those were mini-sites created for specific campaigns, and were taken offline after the campaign ended.

[Animats]

There's a lot to be said for Flash. It's a good visual design environment. It certainly beats the horror of CSS/Javascript/WebAssembly/WebGL we have now.

(Giving page designers total control over scrolling was a huge mistake.)

[Aardwolf]

I love flash for games and movies but never for webpage content or navigation

[zeveb]

> I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.

The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.

We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.

JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.

[omg_ketchup]

I'm not even talking about the consumption side of Flash. I'm just talking about the tooling for creating Flash content.

Did you ever use Flash? It was incredible. Draw right there on the canvas with basically Illustrator-esque tools (or just File->Open whatever .jpg you want). You can add a keyframe in the timeline, and just drag the image to wherever you want. Then you hit play, it looks right, then you hit publish, and it would play exactly the same in any browser ever.

Also, ActionScript 3 was basically typed javascript, back in like 2004.

[cableshaft]

I'm with you. I used to be able to crank out a Flash game, with art, in a or two in my spare time, no big deal, not have to look anything up, I knew exactly how the whole system worked (I literally made games completely disconnected from the internet the entire time, my productivity was crazy high), never had to waste a bunch of time fighting frameworks or seeing how things interacted, and could get it to sing (although it had definite limitations. Everything existed in a movieclip object, for example, so when I was asked to port a C++ game that had 900+ objects on the screen at a time it really slowed down).

With Flash, I once ported a game to Flash, from scratch, with art (but no sound...although I could have added sound), in the span of 12 hours, and while it wasn't my most popular game or anything I still get people telling me how much they enjoyed it 15 years later.

In fact, the most popular game I ever designed and released, Proximity, I designed and released in a single week of work (in my spare time).

I have never been able to match the speed and flow of development that I got with Flash since with any game engine since then, and I've tried a whole bunch trying to find something.

The closest thing to it now seems to be Unity but that's a much bigger beast that I don't have a full grasp on and have to look things up or download various things from the asset store. It's possible to make games quickly, but they'll probably play and look like garbage if you don't take your time with them and hire a proper artist, judging by the flood of garbage Unity games released on Steam.

Pico-8 is also fun to program with (it includes a built in sprite editor, level editor, and music editor), but it's a little too limited for my tastes, since I can't really make a commercial product with it, and I'm not that great at doing 2d pixel art. But I still spent some time doing most of a port of Proximity while playing around with it and for people who can do pixel art it's a lot of fun to use.

* 12 hour game, Squarez: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/91933 * Proximity: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

[jsjohnst]

These same tools exist now for generating similar content sans Flash. Heck, the company behind Flash (well, the acquiring company behind Flash) even makes some of said tools.

[tannhaeuser]

Flash did use JavaScript. More precisely, ActionScript, which is the abandoned JavaScript 4 with classes etc. very much like Java. What Flash had was a usable scene graph + synced audio, though, rather than half-arsed attempts to use the DOM/CSS, canvas (immediate mode 2D), undermaintained SVG, or WebGL. I wonder why we were so fast to kill Flash (myself included); maybe it would have been worth to try and open-up Flash. Many, many more designers could author Flash and create valuable content compared to the schizophrenic web stack we have today.

[tomcooks]

> Flash was so easy to work with

EH?

[jazzyjackson]

I wasn't really around in its hayday but it had a very low barrier to entry - I remember lots of cartoons being spread years before youtube, you couldn't stream video, but you could wait a minute and then watch a flash animation. You didn't have to be a programmer to make content.

[captn3m0]

As an example, the old jkrowling.com website had a great non website interface.