Decorative Animation
1st edition — by Patrick McNeil — Sep. 6, 2007
The Design Element
As a web developer who mostly works with CSS and HTML I am always intrigued by the possibilities flash offers. This is partially because I simply don't use flash and therefore find it a bit fascinating. Like being entranced by the magic of some gizmo you don't understand. While many flash sites are so extremely "flashy," many others simply have elements of flash that give it a flash feel while not making for such an over the top experience. One such element is what I have dubbed Decorative Animation.
Decorative Animation is animation in an interface that is pretty much there for decoration. I suppose you could say this about most any animation done in flash, but my real goal was to set it apart from what would be considered true animation. True animation being more along the lines of characters walking around and what not.
My real point with all this, besides a bloated introduction, is that I find the use of decorative animation to be quiet inspiring. When you are used to working with static designs it is fascinating to see how a little (or a lot) of animation can really breath some life into a design. Not only does this make me want to learn flash, but it makes me want to dig into tools such as moo.fx and other tools that enable animations.
I imagine the flash developers among us here will be rather bored with this post, and I think the list is far to short, but it gets the idea started and I will be expanding this topic the same as the many others out there. This set of links is just a nice starter for showing an assortment of implementations around this style.
Sample Usage
