Mobile Flash Art: cell phone as artistic platform

Tokyo’s always interesting PingMag has posted a story discussing the way Flash Lite (the mobile device version of the Flash Player)
is enabling new kinds of pocket-sized expressiveness.  Lightweight, interactive vector art = lots o’ creative possibilities.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and designing for a small screen, low bandwidth/processor, etc. can be a fun challenge.  Some of my own favorite Web development projects involved marathon efforts to squeeze the last half-KB out of a Web banner and still have it work well (here’s a humble, 9-year-old piece for British Airways, from the pre-ImageReady/Fireworks days of DeBabelizer & GIF Builder).  The Photoshop beta includes mobile authoring hooks, and I look forward to seeing what people create with it.

Interesting (albeit unsourced) factoid from the article: "The average high-school girl in Japan spends around 15 000 yen per month for mobile content (about 99 Euro or 127 Dollars)."  So, there’s real money to be made in this market, at least in Japan.  We’ve met with designers at Disney creating mobile content for the US market, and it’ll be interesting to see how things develop here & elsewhere.

0 thoughts on “Mobile Flash Art: cell phone as artistic platform

  1. Hi John, I posted about this a while back, but good to see it picked up again by Adobe!
    http://www.scottjanousek.com/blog/2006/12/01/mobile-flash-art-cell-phone-as-artistic-platform/
    Perhaps they might distribute content through their own service? I think I may have posted about that too:
    http://www.scottjanousek.com/blog/2006/09/25/disneymobile-launched/
    Comment if you can, otherwise no worries.
    [You’re way ahead of me, Scott. Unfortunately I don’t have additional info/insights to share. –J.]

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