One week ago I started a new job as a web designer at a development company called T8 Webware. T8 creates web sites for financial institutions based in Flash which is a completely different world of design than I’m accustomed to. In the last several years I’ve designed in Photoshop then hand coded everything into xHTML and CSS. Now my responsibilities are to design using Illustrator and import the vector file to Flash. Getting used to Illustrator was fairly easy since most Adobe applications are set up similarly, so I’m thankful to Adobe for that.

Since the release of Apple’s revolutionary iPad, the developer community has been torn between the usage of HTML5 and Flash, since the iPad doesn’t support Flash. There are some clever tricks that convert the Flash to JavaScript but it’s slow and inefficient. Many argue that HTML5 and JavaScript should be used to phase out Flash since they are standards based, but there are still many things that even incredibly coded markup cannot do in comparison to Flash.

Why can’t HTML and Flash live in harmony?

I see strength in both and I don’t think either of them is going to give an inch in the battle. There’s no way Adobe would let go of Flash even if cutting edge Apple products don’t support them out of the box. And HTML is continually enhanced to support more rich media, it’s easy to learn and is the building cornerstone of web development.

So in the coming weeks (and years) I will be exploring the world of Flash just as I have done so with HTML for the past several years.