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December 17, 1997
from PIXEL, Inc. 
Jonathen Scott, owner, with help from Senior Designer Paul O'Reilly
Many months back, I was walking around our production studio and peeked over the shoulder of our senior designer. He was working in Macromedia Flash. I didn't think a thing of it, until I walked by hours later. He was still aggressively clicking and squinting, sitting up, sitting back, all the while considering the same frame of a Flash movie. I thought it was odd, since I was the stated "Flash Developer," and he had a ton of high-priority work to do. Later, hours into the night, Flash again. Intrigued, I rolled my chair over, and asked what was up.
Paul had figured that since the Flash palette leads gracefully to the Web palette, he could make clean, bitmapped images by taking screen-shots and cropping them to create perfect, Web-safe GIFs of a kind never seen before, with the sweeping shapes, text, and gradients usually exclusive to a vector based animating tool. What's more, if brought into Adobe Photoshop, and then exported as Gif89A, an exact palette could be selected, based on the Web palette, and the file size could be reduced to just the 10 or so colors in what he was working on.
Naturally, Paul's experiment was a success. As in several shops, Flash is now an intimate component in all of our development. It fills the gap between Illustrator and Photoshop. Rather than copying text or shape changes directly from Illustrator to Photoshop, we can now paste from Illustrator to Flash, where the vector images and outlines can be easily manipulated in a multi-layer, multi-frame format, until the designer is pleased with the perspective or motion. Then the image is filled with Web colors.
Where this technique really shines is in the creation of animated GIFS. They can now be created in a vector-based application, with seamless, perfect movement. The key frames can then be exported as GIFs -- or if you prefer, screen shots -- and reassembled in a GIF animating tool.
If you've a keen eye for motion, you've probably noticed in the GIF animation produced by the better shops a trend to include more ambitious text -- which changes size, rather than simply moving laterally or popping on and off -- and shapes that come to or recede from the viewer. Entire animated elements can be built and viewed at one time, rather than frame by frame or in a Photoshop file with 50 layers. If you're especially concerned about your file size, you can still crop to the relevant (animated or changing) area, and x,y them perfectly in your GIF animating app.
Don't bother using Flash to export your image to an animated GIFfile. You'll get a GIF of every frame -- each utilizing the full Web palette -- so a moderately sized animation could yield a 200K GIF. It's better to export a series of BMP or PIT files, delete the unnecessary frames, and then apply a custom palette to each remaining frame in Photoshop.
If you're trying to match your GIFs to table or page background colors, PANTONE ColorWeb's fan is priceless.Just find your RGB values on the chips; the HTML value is printed there, too. In Flash, you can get the exact RGB values of the colors you've chosen in your animation by selecting the color palette icon at the bottom of the color pop-up palette. From there, select Solid Colors to make any colors you May have changed snap back to the Web palette, and there you'll see the RGB values displayed.
A smarter, more intuitive way to get the RGB values is to take a screenshot of the Flash palette (Solid Colors checked first), and open it in Photoshop (another of Paul's tricks). Then you'll be working with the same palette layout, and you can use the eyedropper look up the RGB value, and you can edit your individual frames if needed.
Photo Credit: PhotoDisc
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