First steps in Flash

Banners and other graphics are part of the furniture of any website and, thanks to useful tools from companies such as Xara, it’s easy to create good-looking images that can be used as buttons, logos and other elements on your site ­ you can also do some pretty clever things with CSS now as well. But Flash is the most widely deployed web plug-in, capable of amazing effects.

If you want a simple animation, such as a bit of rotating text, you don’t really need Adobe’s Flash ­ programs such as Xara Xtreme and Swishmax can create animations for you and Xara’s tools are easy to use.

Flash can be an intimidating application if you’ve never used it, but it’s simple to do some rudimentary things that could form an interesting opening page on your site or advertising banner.

The Flash workspace
Start Flash ­ – here we’re using Flash Professional CS3 ­ – you’ll see a splash screen asking you what you want to create, or if you want to open a recent file. Click to create a new Flash file, using Actionscript 3.

We’re going to start with a black background and have a picture fade into view, before some text appears, with links ­ it should create a fairly pleasant effect, as a welcome page to a website. The frame rate at 12 per second should be fast enough.

Let’s start by getting our background picture in there. Save the document and then from the File menu choose Import to stage (Ctrl & R), locate your background image and import it as a movie ­ if your image contains layers and text, you can choose to keep those editable. Rescale via the Modify menu if you need to change the size. You’ll see the imported file listed in the library pane at the right of the screen.