Adobe® CS4 Web Workflows: Building Web Sites With Adobe® Creative Suite® 4

Chapter 12. ANIMATING PHOTOSHOP GRAPHICS IN FLASH

In order to get a site visitor's attention immediately, many animate their graphics in Flexible Marketing Areas (FMAs) —and the animation tool of choice on the Web is Adobe Flash. Flash CS4 Professional, included in Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web bundle, offers a great number of tools to bring your motion graphics to life.

The heartbeat of animation in Flash is the tween. Just as you plot the anchor points and Illustrator draws the connecting path, with tweens you set key points where something changes—position, scale, opacity—and Flash generates the transitions over time. There are three types of tweens: a shape tween, a motion tween, and a classic tween. As you might guess, shape tweens are used when the shape of an object changes; motion tweens handle everything else and will be the focus of this chapter. Classic tweens are the variety used prior to Flash CS4 and are included in Flash for backwards compatibility.

In the following exercises, you'll have an opportunity to integrate, animate, and update the Photoshop FMA graphic developed in the previous chapter. You'll also learn how to use some of the motion tween power tools that Flash provides and finish off this workflow by bringing the FMA into Dreamweaver. Here are the core Flash techniques ...