The following comes from something I wrote a ways back. I shall expound further, after.

Goddamn, I hate flash. Flash intros, Flash Movies, the Low quality flash encoding that Youtube uses. All of it. It sucks. Slow loading, resource hogging, flashing, dinging, obnoxious, poorly designed shite that comes out of so-called “Designers”.

All you people who use Flash to build websites ever stop to think what’ll happen if suddenly Adobe kills development of Flash? Say Goodbye to your sites, folks, cause you’ll have to rebuild them from the ground up.

It seems that every 2-bit asshat with an idea calls themselves a flash designer. Which leads to shitty ass sites that are hard to navigate, have missing hotspots, don’t show up in searches, and most of all, just don’t work.

Just this morning, I’ve visited 3 sites that had content that was unaccessable because of bad design. Three bands whose music I was interested in have lost a possible fan (read customer…) because I couldn’t actually hear the music, or see the pictures. Now, I’m sure you are thinking, “what are you? SOme Kind of luddite? Just install flash.” Well, I DO have flash installed, thankyouverymuch. Goddamned idiots left tags unclosed or some other stupid mistake that makes nothing happen when you click where it tells you to.
If the same sites were coded with dhtml, javascript, etc, I could grab the source and find the error, and see/hear the content the client wanted me to. Instead, I get pissed off, close the window, and never go back.

It almost makes me miss the blink tag…..

While Flash and it’s ilk (Silverlight, AIR, etc) still annoy me, they have been overtaken by the “Web 2.0” school of design. Not everything needs to be AJAX’ed all to hell and back. A menu can just be a menu, dammit. Sometimes (I’m looking at YOU visual arts people), I’d like to see an image, photo, piece of art at something larger than trading card size, in it’s own window. I won’t hire you, or publicize you if I can’t bloody well see or show your work.

Another trend I’ve noticed is a distinct lack of margins. Given that the current UI school thinks that borderless application windows is the way to go, having no margin on your page makes reading it painful. I keep wondering why my bloody browser needs to scroll left…oh. The text just looks like it’s falling in the gutter – which, while a fine place for a mind, is not the right place for print.

One last word, boys and girls gurls, Pastels on white never worked. It only works on Flickr because text is not the focus.