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ISBN: |
1903450365 |
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Authors: |
Jonathon Gay,
Yugo Nakamura, Vas Sloutchevsky,
Samuel Wan,
Marc Stricklin,
Chris Andrade,
Gabriel Mulzer,
Brian Limmond,
Pete Barr-Watson,
Mickey Stretton,
Josh Levine,
Jessica Speigel,
Hoss Gifford,
Manuel Tan,
Amit Pitaru,
Ross
Mawdsley,
Erik Natzke
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Price: |
US
$59.99 |
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Pages: |
544 |
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CD Rom: |
Yes |
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Published: |
Out
Now | |
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New Masters of Flash: The 2002 Annual
Flash has upped the standard for web motion
graphics and has been welcomed with open arms on account of its
powerful new ActionScripting capabilities. Following on from the
phenomenal success of New Masters of Flash, the Flash Annual will
bring together a new collection of the hottest Flash design talents
on the planet, all of whom have grabbed attention in the preceding
year. Who is this Book for?
- Web artists with experience in the Flash
environment, and who know some ActionScript.
- Aspiring designers looking for inspirations and
direction from industry leaders.
What
does the Book cover?
New Masters: Flash
Annual 2002 will give competent web artists inspiration on
cutting-edge Flash design techniques, as well as hard tutorial
information on how to build top class effects. The format builds on
the best of the original best-selling title while improving in areas
where the first volume was weaker, (e.g. generic customisable code
examples), while the talents, the inspirations and effects are all
of the moment and represent the mature and expert deployment of the
staggering new capabilities of Flash 5 ActionScript.
The Flash Annual format: The Intro is a series of 3
"field-report" essays written by key New Masters from the previous
year covering new Talents, New Techniques and New Trends. The main
body of the book is then an evolution from the original format. This
time, as well as the Inspiration and Tutorial sections, we add a
third section to each chapter, Headnotes. Part summary, part chapter
commentary, part code overview, the Headnotes section teases out the
reusable and generic elements of the previous tutorial and suggests
ways forward for the reader.
Summary of
contents
Pencils
Inspire
1. Slide
2.
Pollen
3. Flower
4. Axis
5. Depth
6. Time
7.
Regenerate
8. Chronometry
9. Drive
10. Today
11.
Trick
12. Flutter
13. Flux
14. Talk
15. Toys
Reviews
Computer Arts
magazine
Winter 2001 5 Star
Review
"Whether you're a seasoned Flash designer or just starting out,
you'll find this annual filled with inspiration, beauty and
functionality, featuring practical examples of each of the 15
artists' work.
Every chapter offers a diverse approach to the Flash project
under construction, as well as an insight into the mind of each
artist being showcased. On a practical level, you'll be able to
deconstruct each of the design projects chosen by the artists as a
representation of their work.
Each chapter has well-produced screenshots of Flash screens, plus
coding examples which enable you to get the heart of the
ActionScript being implemented. Use this book for inspiration in you
own work and to marvel at what is being done today with Flash
design."
www.pixelsurgeon.com
9 out of 10
Reviewed by Brett Archibald
"Hey kids! Have you ever wanted to create great-looking Flash
sites like brittle-bones.com - that one with the bizarre draggable
spider-baby? Or how about those cool and crazy menus used on
yigal-azrouel.com and freshfroot.com? And we just know that you're
dying to hear some wise words of wisdom from the guy who designed
the mtv2.co.uk website! Well now you can do all this and more with
the release of Friends Of Ed's brand new and improved New Masters of
Flash Annual 2002! At just $59.99 (US) / £47.99 (UK), it's a bargain
you can't afford to miss out on! Don't delay - order yours
today!
I first came across Friends Of Ed a little over a year ago whilst
browsing my local bookstores for a book on how to improve my Flash
ActionScripting skills. I had been working with Flash for a number
of years, and had recently upgraded to Flash version 5, and I
realised that I had to seek external help if I wanted to take my
skills that little bit further and keep up with the rest of the
fast-moving web industry. As a designer primarily, and a programmer
secondarily - only because I have to be if I want to transform my
crazy ideas into working models - I wanted a book that would not
only teach me how to work more with complicated ActionScript, but
that would also take me above and beyond ActionScript and into Flash
design. I wanted a book that was filled with great ideas, and would
in turn fill me with great ideas. I wanted a book that had amazing
examples of award-winning websites that would inspire me, and fill
me with the desire to create beautiful amazing work. Many weeks and
months spent wandering around all the bookstores, browsing all
manner of categories - design, internet, scripting - made me think I
was asking for too much to be all in one book. I thought I would
have to buy several books and combine them all in order to fulfil my
needs. How naive I was back then.
I had been working with Flash ever since version 3 was just a
baby, and I was producing work that I was relatively pleased with,
and that my paying clients were more than pleased with, but still it
was not enough. I wanted more. I wanted my work to be the kind of
work that would win the prestigious Macromedia Site Of The Day
award. So I had been browsing the bookshops for quite awhile, but in
all that time nothing ever really caught my eye, nothing ever really
stood out as offering me more than what the User Manual that came in
the Flash box offered. But that was kind of the problem really; as I
said before, I am a designer primarily, and although the HTML Help
Pages that come with Flash 5 may cover every aspect of the
programme, they don't really make for interesting reading, for one.
They're more there for you to turn to when you get stuck using the
application itself. And besides, the help pages don't really go into
anywhere near enough detail for my non-programmer's brain to
understand. I'm one of those more 'arty types', and all the books I
had ever come across in the past seemed to fall into one of two main
categories:
Example (A) - Very basic: "...To draw a circle, click on the
'circle' tool. That's the one that looks like a circle..."
Or example (B) - Very technical: "...To draw a circle, calculate
the circumference using the algebraic formula
'Y=sqrt(r^2-(x-xctr)^2) +yctr' where 'input' =
'(r*r)-((x-xctr)*(x-xctr))'...".
Now I don't know about you, but I didn't understand a word of
that last one. And the sad thing is, that's not a made-up example,
that's an actual true example from a source .fla file that I
downloaded from a well-known Flash help site. Example A was
obviously no good to me as I had long since passed that level merely
by managing to turn the computer on all by myself, and although
example B may have drawn a circle if typed correctly, it didn't tell
why I was doing what I was doing, and how what I was doing worked.
As such it didn't instil me with a sense of understanding and I
could not re-use this information to draw, say, a rectangle, if I
wanted to take this knowledge I had 'learned' and apply it
elsewhere. I wanted a book that went into great detail, explaining
every single step, telling me what I was doing as I was doing it,
and why I was doing it, without being patronising. I wanted a book
that gave me real-world examples and useful applications.
Then one day, a very attractive book caught my eye. It appealed
to me before I even opened its silky smooth cover. It was dressed in
a very beautiful black pink jacket with pink trim, and had the most
alluring smile I had ever seen. And those eyes were just to die for.
It was a face that could almost have been painted by Leonardo da
Vinci himselfÉ What I had in fact found was Friends Of Ed, and in
particular, the first New Masters of Flash annual. I knew instantly
that I wanted to buy it. A quick browse of it in the bookshop
revealed examples from some of the best-known names in the Flash
industry (Yugo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, Eric JordanÉ the list goes
on), examples of the kind of work that I aspired to. And the New
Masters of Flash annual 2002 is just as impressive (see top of
review for full contributor listing). These people don't just tell
you how to achieve certain effects that they have used in their own
websites, sites that have made them household names in the Flash
community, but they also tell you how to achieve these effects and
use them in conjunction with other effects and use them in a
real-world situation. In other words; they don't just tell you how
to draw our example circle and leave it at that.
This book sits at the peak of Friends Of Ed's three defining
categories, or skill levels: 'Foundation - learning it', 'Studio -
doing it', and 'New Masters - showing it'. New Masters is as good as
the talent out there gets. The contributors to the book in each
chapter precede their examples with an introductory section on who
they are, and how they came to be where they are now, in web-design
terms. They tell you how they progressed from being the common or
garden variety of person like you or me, into the Flash Gods and
Goddesses that they are today. They tell you what makes them tick.
They tell you why they do what they do. They tell you everything you
could ever want to know, and this makes for a highly interesting
background read, before they round off the introduction with a few
lines on the inspirations and ideas behind the particular example
they will be guiding you through. After this, you dive headfirst
into their most intimate pieces of code.
The tutorials that are worked through are really up close and
detailed, and absolutely nothing is skipped: each chapter begins
with instructions on what size to create your canvas and what frame
rate to set your movie at, and finishes by telling you to export
your final .swf file. No stone is left unturned. In between you have
not only the highly sophisticated descriptions, but also all manner
of screenshots (which reveals an interesting fact that only two
designers in the whole book use Apple Macs), and practically every
line of ActionScript code used in the file is typed out. More
useful, of course, would be to have the .fla files themselves, to
pick at the source code directly, and so of course Friends Of Ed
have provided us with an accompanying CD containing not just every
single .fla used in the book, but you also get video interviews with
some of the designers, and if the static printed screenshots in the
book aren't enough for you, then you can just sit back and watch the
absolutely amazing animated walkthroughs on how to build and
progress your movie in the familiar realms of the application
itself. So if you don't feel like lugging the massive 500+ page book
around with you when you go somewhere, just pop the CD into your
pocket and you've got everything you need.
The New Masters of Flash annual 2002 continues in the fine
tradition of its predecessor, but now, in response to your demands,
there is a brand new third element to be found at the end of each
chapter: Headnotes. This is basically a small section in which we
are told how to expand the example we have just worked through, or
how we can alter it ever so slightly to get a totally different end
result. So if for example, the tutorial walks you through an effect
that makes use of the cursor's X position to control a horizontal
slide of some sort, the headnotes might suggest making use of both
the X AND Y properties of the cursor to create an object that seems
to rotate in 3D. It's things like this that mean the book is not
just a set of 15 set, un-changeable effects that you can't do much
with without looking like you're ripping off the creator, which some
people may mistakenly believe when merely skimming through the book.
The headnotes invite your mind to look at the examples not as one
complete contained effect, but rather one end result that was
achieved by using a whole range of possible techniques within Flash,
and that it is these individual techniques that your mind should be
looking to and combining when wanting to create any other effects of
your own. The headnotes show just how easy it can be.
Although this book is aimed at people who are "at the summit" and
it is written by some of the leading Flash designers in the world,
people who are 'advanced users', it is a book that absolutely every
Flash user (and a whole bunch of non-Flash users) of every skill
level will enjoy and appreciate immensely. The whole book is written
in easy-to-understand terms, without ever once being patronising.
This is not only an excellent book on how to learn to work with a
fairly advanced level of Flash, but it is also an excellent
standalone design book.
The best line in this book is where it says: "Although small text
looks cool, it does have the unfortunate side-effect that no-one can
read it. This may bother Mr. Nielsen, but not us." Classic.
In wrapping up, I would have to say that if it wasn't for the
fact that New Masters of Flash: the first annual already exists,
then I would have no hesitation in saying that this is the finest
Flash design book out there. Perhaps it was just because the first
annual was the first of its kind, or perhaps it simply was a better
book... I don't know...But either way, this book is a must-have for
your collection."
BRETT RATING: 9/10
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