Hacks #42-51
Text in
Flash need not be limited to static words whose only purpose in life
is to remain still and be read. Flash can optionally treat your text
as either vector shapes or as a series of movie clips, both of which
have the advantage of enabling you to animate your text. You only
have to look at film titles to see how striking animated text can
become and how movement can amplify the meaning of the text, or even
add subtexts in the same way body language is a subtext to the spoken
word. The following Flash sites show some of the possibilities of
text effects in Flash:
Typorganism
(http://www.typorganism.com) is dedicated to illustrating what it calls
"kinetic typography"—effects
that animate text to add meaning through motion. Overage4Design (http://www.overage4design.com) offers a modern design that uses text as a
graphic rather than something that is simply there to be read. Yugo
Nakamura's Mono-craft (http://www.yugop.com) was one of the first
sites to use text in novel and interactive ways. Mono-craft Version
2.0 is considered one of the defining sites from the
"golden age" of Flash 4 and 5
development, when the now-standard Flash design concepts were
formulated by the first wave of Flash designers to use modern
ActionScript techniques. Saul Bass on the
Web (http://www.saulbass.net) is maintained by the well-known Flash
designer Brendan Dawes. It pays homage to Saul
Bass (1920-1996), who was one of the first people to use text as a
moving graphic in film. Bass also used text as a graphic element in
the associated film posters, as did the Soviet Modernist design
movement (circa 1920) that predated him.
As well as its animation abilities, Flash text is much more
configurable in terms of appearance than standard HTML.
Vector-based Flash text can:
Be displayed at any angle and at any size. Render characters with vectors and add antialiasing for all fonts. Use any font, including those not installed on the
user's machine by embedding font outline information
within the Flash .swf file. Allow the user to break up and edit the characters within a piece of
text (using Modify Break Apart), thus allowing the designer
to quickly create logos or other text-based graphics quickly. You can
even use a shape tween to morph one letter into another [Hack #34] . Support more traditional CSS formatting and HTML text [Hack #46], even when content is
displayed outside the browser (i.e., in the standalone Flash Player
or if you export your Flash content as an executable).
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