We used to call ourselves “motion designers.” People who flirted with a new type of design where things moved, videos played, and content was immersive.

I’m ashamed to say I wasted a lot of my formative years learning Actionscript, keyframe animating, and some BS catchphrase called R.I.A. design.

I bought the Macromedia pitch pretty wholeheartedly. While Zeldman was preaching standards, I was still obsessed with the idea that the internet would turn into something like an interactive television.

I still think it might, eventually, but we’re further away from that now than ever. I’m glad the industry caught its breath, and a dose of sanity about interface design, but I miss “motion design.”

Flash became aggressive when Adobe took it over. Like PDF before it, Flash turned away from being a simple content delivery platform, and started to turn into a market cornering “business development initiative.”

Creative people, myself included, want things easy. We want to be enabled to do things quicker and better. We are often willing to trade freedom for productivity, and the enabling of creativity.

I wasn’t one of the first to start feeling the handcuffs Flash was putting on us, but I felt them just the same. It’s too bad. I bet I’m not the only one who remembers how Flash used to feel. How empowering it was to play with animated interactivity. To create immersive interaction beyond the page refresh and “submit” button.

Today we’re starting to get interactive animation in the form of javascript libraries. It’s really great, and it’s better for the future- but its not the same. Adobe, you missed the boat… So much excitement around a platform, and now the only time Flash comes up seriously in a conversation its about video,  spinning logos, or why it crashed.

We go so far out of our way these days to avoid Flash, the other day we were talking about how the animated gif ought to be used more.

That technology dates back to the early 90’s.