No Comments Written by Bjorn on June 10, 2009 – 10:00 am

I know a few web designers out there with dope skills in Photoshop and Illustrator that produce ill design compositions. They know about usability and can sometimes work wonders in CSS and might even be familiar with jQuery. However, when it comes to Flash, these designers are not quite sure where their talents fit in.

They might be able to produce some crazy animations, but in terms of creating one of those nice photography portfolios sites or anything else that belongs on thefwa.com, well to put it simply, actionscript and flex are a bit over their heads.

It has taken me years to get a firm understanding of how everything fits together in the world of Flash, although now that’s been flipped on its head again! Adobe, who owns Flash, is probably best known for its creative suite products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Dreamweaver and Flash. Their advantage over the rest of the industry is that their products are the industry standard.

They have created a new tool which allows designers to create a functional Flash website out of Photoshop and Illustrator design comps called Catalyst. Catalyst turns the design comps into Flash components and allows you to add interactions to them, such as clicking a button and going to another screen without touching a line of code. Now, say you did want to add code, such as connecting your new Flash website to some Facebook services, well these Catalyst projects can be exported and opened in the new Flash Builder tool where some crazy actionscript developer can add that in.

It’s a very interesting work flow that looks to make current processes easier. Catalyst has been released on Adobe Labs for download and it comes with many examples and tutorials. Adobe are throwing events for the beta launches of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

What: Adobe Catalyst and Flash Builder Launch

When: June 17, 6 pm – 9 pm

Where: CQ Functions, 113 Queen Street, Melbourne