Simple question regarding flash

Hi everyone. I am a born again (returning) web designer. Between lapses I retained most of my knowledge that I need.

There is one aspect of web design that I know nothing about and this is FLASH web design.

I have flash MX with my studio MX and am taking the lessons and tutorials included.

I have a questions about this and another thing:

1. Beyond the included tutorials, what is a good source of information specifically for the web design aspect of flash - as opposed to focusing on animations or games etc - I want to be able to essentially make a site entirely in flash. Does this involve learning alot of actionscript for example?

My example is the ability to include the materials on such a site as www.2advanced.com with email sending and things like this.

My second question is simple:

Where is a good place to get royalty free graphics of things like musical equipment and recording equipment? It's a specific need and I wouldn't know where to go

Thank you all!

Unfortunately, to get the most out of Flash you will need to know a certain amount of ActionScript. I am in a similar position as you and use these two resources for learning. There are also forums on these two sites to get any help that you may need which is very useful.

http://www.actionscripts.org/tutorials.shtml
http://www.kirupa.com/

As for the royalty free images, the following link will come in very useful. They source pictures from many companies for you. You can buy royalty free CDs (Usually around £300), it is well worth doing a search to see if they have the specific images you need.

http://creative.gettyimages.com/

For the best flash sites, check out this archive:
http://www.favouritewebsiteawards.com/home.html

And my favorite flash site: http://www.24-7media.de/

You will soon get bored with doing all flash sites, it has accessibility limitations, and for us seasoned designers, it gets boring.

I would say learn the tutorials they have, and then start posting up questions here. A lot of sites don't really delve into creating full flash sites, or proper methods, but you will learn in time. Think of every page as a scene in a movie, in time, you'll learn how to put the whole thing together.

1. Beyond the included tutorials, what is a good source of information specifically for the web design aspect of flash - as opposed to focusing on animations or games etc - I want to be able to essentially make a site entirely in flash. Does this involve learning alot of actionscript for example?

To do it right will invlove learning Actionscript. I would also suggest that learning a few key things that aren't common knowledge would help such as-

1- NEVER use scenes, use controlled frames with movieclips
2- Seperate data from design as much as possible by loading image and textual content dynamically.

The best dedicated Flash community is-

http://www.were-here.com not FlashKit which has a lot of content but a it takes awhile to sort the wheat from the chaff.

You can also find a lot of articles, downloads and tutorials that I've written about Flash here:

Articles
---------
http://www.dotdragnet.com/subsubcat.php?type=article&subcat=flash&main=web


Downloads
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http://www.dotdragnet.com/subsubcat.php?type=download&subcat=flash&main=web

Where is a good place to get royalty free graphics of things like musical equipment and recording equipment? It's a specific need and I wouldn't know where to go

Not sure about musical equipment per se, but ehre's a few royalty free non-rights managed image banks I use.

http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.intuitivmedia.de/index2.htm
http://www.ppdigital.com/free/gallery/