Once upon a time, there was a cool software named Macromedia Flash. Back in the 90’s and 2000’s, Flash stood out in the World Wide Web for its ability to generate stunning content - animations, interactive sites and even games. The images were vector-based, meaning, they consisted of lines that could grow or shrink without any loss of quality. And you could make an entire website in Flash - buttons, transitions, animations and everything - using its coding language, Actionscript. And this is exactly how the original Créu Official Website was made!
It looked something like this:
Ah, those mouse cursor trails!! That is SOOO year 2000. You would enter some site and suddenly your very own cursor transformed like magic, leaving sparkles behind anywhere you clicked! It was mega cute.
The Créu Official Website was a “Template Shop”, a specialty website where users could download images or copy an HTML code (programming language that is used to display content on a web browser), which they could paste directly on their site or blog. Remember when I said that the 2000’s were full of cute blogs? That’s right! But unlike other Shops which used copyrighted material, Créu Official Website was the only one with characters fully dedicated to this sole purpose.
You could even download an entire Créu theme for your blog!
When you entered a Flash site, you noticed right away that it was different than a regular HTML site. It was unique, interactive and the graphics looked awesome on any screen.
There was just one problem - it took FOREVER to load.
Internet speeds may have been bad (raise your hand if you had a “dial-up” connection and couldn’t use the phone while using Internet!) But even then, nobody had the patience to wait.
If that wasn’t troublesome enough, Macromedia was eventually bought by Adobe Systems and, later on when the iPhone and other smartphones arrived, new technologies emerged. Flash sites required a separate plugin to run and they didn’t fit well on mobile phones, so Flash began losing support. New solutions in web design appeared that could generate stunning, interactive websites, without all the Flash hassle.
And so, Adobe Flash became deprecated. In fact, it has an official end-of-life on December 31, 2020.
RIP Flash.
I always wonder how things would have turned out if we just kept the Flash version of Créu’s website up and running… would people love it? Hate it? Was it better this way? Did we do the right thing?
With technology, things are always changing fast. Today, we are thankful for super fun and customer-friendly website builders such as Wix and Shopify, which lets many of our webdesign dreams come true =^^= But who knows, another 20 years from now, what will be the next big thing?
Maybe one of these days we will put online the old Créu Official Website so you guys can experience it... if you dare ;)