tattoo artist workstation

The Flash Age of Interactivity
(1998-2008)

Project Insights & Outcomes

A decade of interactive work built in Flash, from 1998 to 2008. Flash is gone, killed by the iPhone and the shift to mobile, but what it made possible, genuine interactivity, motion, and narrative woven into the experience of a website, is only now starting to come back. Tools like Rive and Spline are beginning to close that gap. The web is different now, and so are the platforms, the users, and the expectations. But the thinking behind this work still holds up. I think I can bring together the best of the past and present to make better future interactive work

Howell LTD
Photography Website

A software-inspired Flash portfolio platform for New England's pioneering digital commercial photography studio, serving clients like Talbots, J.Jill, and Cuddledown.

Challenge
Howell Ltd. had built a reputation on technical sophistication, patented imaging technology, and a client roster that expected a certain level of professionalism. They needed a portfolio platform that matched that reputation, one that felt like professional photography software rather than a traditional website, while remaining manageable by internal staff without developer involvement.
Approach
I toured the studio during active shoots, learning their imaging technology and interviewing stakeholders across departments. At the time, websites generally fell into three categories: standard HTML layouts, editorial designs, or motion graphics Flash approaches. A software-inspired interface was unconventional, which made it a natural signal of technical sophistication that matched both their capabilities and their positioning. The interface drew from Apple Aperture and the photo capture software they used in-house. SWFObject deep linking, newly released in 2006, enabled direct URL sharing of specific portfolio sections to support sales workflows. An XML-driven content system let internal staff update images and text without touching source files, and I trained an employee on XML structure, image optimization, and FTP workflows, establishing content guidelines they could sustain independently.
Outcome
The owner and team were enthusiastic about the result. The XML system did its job so well that internal staff handled all updates independently, which was the goal from the start. Like all Flash work, it eventually gave way to the iPhone era, but it ran without issue for as long as the platform allowed.
Role
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Interaction Design, UX/UI Design, Flash Development, Client Strategy, & Content Strategy.

Jay York
Photography Website

A Flash website for Jay York, a commercial photographer specializing in fine art documentation. The site included 2D and 3D slideshows of client work, a light-hearted analog-style slideshow telling Jay's life story, and business information.

Challenge
Jay York was a commercial photographer specializing in art documentation, one of the only photographers in the city offering that service. He wanted to expand to galleries and art auctioneers without losing the working artists and students who already valued his approachable, no-pretense style. The challenge was not explaining what he did. It was selling who he was to two very different audiences at once.
Approach
The typical fine art photography website leans minimal and polished. For Jay that would have been the wrong fit. His studio was a working space filled with collected history and found objects, and his personality was funny, genuine, and completely without pretense. I documented his studio, pulled from his archives, and built the narrative from our interviews. Found objects became functional design elements throughout. The services section featured an old time clock and time card from his studio, listing his services as bullet points signed in his own hand. The About Jay section was written like a television writer breaking a story, blocking beats before scripting transitions to build genuine relatability with both audiences. The site opened with a short intro sequence: two frames of his studio, lights off and lights on, a camera flash, a white transition, and a reveal of the space, followed by his studio name and a DVD-style menu fading in as the soundtrack began.
Outcome
His current clients loved the site and he expanded his business into gallery and art auctioneer photography. Years later, after Flash became obsolete and he moved to a standard HTML portfolio, he said he still misses the original.
Role
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Copywriting, Photography, Interaction Design, Motion Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Lukin Mircosite

A Flash portfolio and promotional website for Lukin, the moniker of Portland, Maine-based fine artist Matt Cote, built to expand his practice into custom mural commissions for homes and businesses.

Challenge
Matt needed to grow into mural commissions without compromising his standing in the fine art community. In the mid-2000s art world, commercial work carried a stigma. Galleries distanced themselves from artists who crossed that line. The site had to position murals as artist commissions rather than commercial jobs, serving two audiences that operated in separate worlds.
Approach
The key insight was that the website itself needed to be an art piece, an extension of his creative world that used the visual language of his paintings to show continuity between fine art and commissioned work. I designed a DVD-style navigation system where content unfolded like a documentary, a format that signaled depth and intention beyond a standard portfolio. The animated loop homepage and motion poster aesthetic created a cinematic experience that positioned the site as artistic rather than transactional. Matt had fine art photography but no mural documentation. With no budget for a photographer, I spent half a day shooting three murals in his home using an early Sony DSLR and DIY lighting, restaging each room to let the murals read clearly at small screen sizes.
Outcome
The site launched before a Boston Globe feature spotlighting Matt's work, and the two together brought in multiple residential interior commissions. He eventually closed the business, not because it failed but because the work didn't suit him long term. The travel pulled him away from his family, and the commercial nature of mural work ran against his instincts as a fine artist. He closed it a couple of years after launching, on his own terms.
Role
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Copywriting, Photography, Motion Design, Character Animation, UX/UI Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Rossignol Website Intro

A Flash motion graphics intro created as a test project for Tag Media for their client, Rossignol, designed as a low-bandwidth cinematic opener to set the tone for incoming visitors. Pure motion graphics and soundtrack, no interactivity. The goal was to capture the feeling of skiing, the daring jumps and the awe-inspiring openness of the mountains, before landing on the tagline and closing on the brand name. A way of saying Rossignol does not just sell equipment, it sells that feeling.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Motion Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Hannaford Guiding Star Pairs Game

A Flash memory game created for Hannaford's Kidzone, a children's section of their website built around the Guiding Stars program, Hannaford's patented nutrition rating system that assigns one, two, or three stars to products based on their nutritional value. Working as Interactive Art Director at Kemp Goldberg Partners, I was brought on to build Kidzone from the ground up, creating the All-Star Gang, a cast of simplified anthropomorphic food characters representing the star ratings. The Pairs game was inspired by the classic memory game, renamed as a nod to both the format and the pair character in the gang. Players matched character cards to learn the stars and their meanings, accompanied by a soundtrack and sound effects art directed from existing audio sources. Note: this archived version is missing the soundtrack.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Character Design, Interaction Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Hannaford Guiding Stars Puzzles Game

A follow-up Flash game for Hannaford's Kidzone, commissioned after Hannaford liked the Pairs game enough to invest in a second. One game with three puzzles, each featuring a different All-Star Gang character, taught kids about healthy foods through narrative-driven clues. As each puzzle piece was placed, a fact clue hinted at the food item being revealed. Solving the puzzle paid off with a funny reveal telling the kid what the food was. A short animated intro set the scene, showing the three puzzle options on a wooden table surface, the way a kid might sit down to play at their parents table. The game included a full soundtrack and foley sound effects for every interaction.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Character Design, Interaction Design, Motion Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Happy Easter Card

A Flash interactive greeting card sent to friends and family in 2006, inspired by the pull-tab mechanisms found in movable books, a centuries-old form of paper engineering where pulling a tab reveals a hidden image or scene. The interaction was simple: pull the tab and get an Easter surprise. A personal project built as a gift and a way to push the craft, translating a tactile analog mechanism into a digital one.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Character Design, Interaction Design, Motion Design, & Flash Development.

Mother’s Day Card

A Flash interactive greeting card built on the same pull-tab mechanism as the Easter Card, this time sent to my mother and the mothers in my life for Mother's Day.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Character Design, Interaction Design, Motion Design, & Flash Development.

Secret Six Microsite Interface

A Flash navigation interface for The Secret Six, an art collective founded in 1998. Inspired by old-school game start screens, the user navigated a carousel with arrow keys and launched each artist's work with the spacebar. Selecting a number transformed it into that member's robot counterpart, revealing the artist's name and artwork title. An early experiment in bringing gaming interaction patterns into web navigation, years before anyone was asking that question.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, Interaction Design, Motion Design, Sound Design, & Flash Development.

Specimen
Series Microsite

A Flash website built around a series of digital fine art paintings influenced by Rorschach tests, rendered in color and modeled form. The imagery draws from biology, microbiology, underwater life, and space, designed to tap into the viewer's psyche and leave interpretation open to their own emotional perception.

Challenge
The Specimen Series was always meant to trigger responses that said as much about the observer as the observed, but that required the right context to work. The original vision was a gallery installation with digital projections, slide viewers, and an ambient score. Without the connections to make that happen, a Flash website became the way to achieve a distilled version of that experience. The challenge was building something that gave the work the mood, narrative, and sensory context it needed to reach the viewer the way it was always intended to.
Approach
The site was designed as a surrealist observatory, a space where the evidence of these specimens had been recorded and collected, sound recordings and slides, for the viewer to study and interpret. Opening title motion graphics set the tone, followed by an ambient animated slideshow of the paintings crossfading over a custom original score composed by collaborator Eric Thibodeau, who had been close to the making of the series from the start. Science equipment photography was manipulated to feel surreal, giving the whole experience a quality somewhere between worlds, as if the viewer had stepped into a liminal space that existed just outside of reality. To get the work out and build an audience, I entered the May 1st Reboot, a global design refresh where designers worldwide simultaneously launched new work on May 1st.
Outcome
The site was designed as a surrealist observatory, a space where the evidence of these specimens had been recorded and collected, sound recordings and slides, for the viewer to study and interpret. Opening title motion graphics set the tone, followed by an ambient animated slideshow of the paintings crossfading over a custom original score composed by collaborator Eric Thibodeau, who had been close to the making of the series from the start. Science equipment photography was manipulated to feel surreal, giving the whole experience a quality somewhere between worlds, as if the viewer had stepped into a liminal space that existed just outside of reality. To get the work out and build an audience, I entered the May 1st Reboot, a global design refresh where designers worldwide simultaneously launched new work on May 1st.
Role
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Painting, Interactive Design, Motion Design, Illustration, & Flash Development.

Bridget Jones's Diary Microsite Demo

A Flash prototype and interactive design pitch for the Miramax promotional website for the 2001 film, developed in collaboration with Brooklyn interactive agency Big Spaceship.

Challenge
The goal was to promote the film in a way that went beyond a trailer. Miramax wanted something experiential, a way for the target audience to get to know the characters before they saw the movie. Flash was the only technology at the time that could deliver that kind of interactive storytelling on the web.
Approach
Working from a brief synopsis without having seen the film, the prototype was built on instinct more than strategy. The layout divided the screen into two panels, with Bridget as a persistent presence on the left, her outfit and mood shifting as you moved through the site. The right panel used her apartment as a backdrop, grounding the experience in her world before a visitor knew much about the story. Characters were introduced as anonymous silhouettes, revealed as photographs only when clicked, with a diary-style quote appearing in script typography over a scene from the film. Each character had their own color palette, so the entire interface shifted tone as you explored. The loading screen kept it light, using illustrated line art of the apartment before the full interface resolved. The underlying idea was that you met the characters the way Bridget did, as impressions before introductions. The film was a love story, so the design leaned into that, borrowing the visual warmth and lightheartedness of Valentine's Day as an emotional key for the whole experience.
Outcome
The pitch did not advance to the final stage. Big Spaceship's concept carried through to completion. It is worth including here not as a showcase of finished work but as an honest marker of where the thinking was at the time: a designer learning to trust instinct while still developing the strategic vocabulary to back it up.
Role
Creative Direction, Art Direction, Interaction Design, Motion Design, & Flash Development.
Contact

A Dream Team,
Super Team-Up
in the making!

What if the two of the best collaborate to make something brilliant? Wonder no further, let that contact form take those wonders away.

Just looking around? Find and follow my social media. See you around.

  • Portland, Maine
  • Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm
Thank you—your message was sent.
[background image] image of an office space (for a home inspector)
Submission failed. Please check your details.