Flash celebrated its 10 years at a conference in Brighton just before Christmas. It was the biggest conference of its kind in the UK for 6 years and made the BBC News website. The conference, called Flash on the Beach, brought together hundreds of developers, designers and illustrators and such legends of the online Flash world as Brendan Dawes, Craig Swann, Hillman Curtis, Aral Balkan and Hoss Gifford. Now, these may not be household names but trust me when I say that they are legends in their field. It was a coming together of the best minds in the industry. People who ask questions of the norm and push the boundaries of their industry in many directions. My personal favourite was Eric Natzke's session. 
Eric is a rare breed of designer who brings maths and art together in equal measure to create something special. See his famous Black + White movie for an example of something beautiful that was created purely with numbers and equations. Eric spoke about how using simple formulae allowed him to make his workflow easier, online file size lighter and more importantly increase his creativity by the ability to adjust variables to produce interesting results.
I have always been fascinated with the relationship between maths and art from the golden ratio of Phi, which appears in countless situations in nature including fern leaves and nautilus shells, to Mandelbrot's beautiful fractal images. The combination of left and right side brain activity is something that can create groundbreaking ideas in both aesthetics and structure.
Flash is now undisputed in being the foremost application for bringing together maths and art, programming and design. It started out as a simple design package. It is now a formidable programming tool and is seeing itself being natively installed in web browsers, mobile devices and games consoles. The conference at Flash on the Beach was attended by 50/50 programmers and artists. It is very rare to get such a specialised conference which has such a diverse range of attendees all singing to the same tune. The atmosphere was electric and I'm sure it will spur many people on to push the boundaries and try new things.
Here's to the next 10 years of Flash. I'm excited to be a part of it.
Technorati Tags: Flash, Flash on the Beach, Natzke
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