As a former Flash dev that worked through those glory days, I tend to agree. The format was just a lot more open and less restrictive in what you could do - especially compared with the early web. We built a lot of different things with it, including games and animations.
Contrast that with the first pure HTML sites I created, which were built with tables and frames. I shudder thinking back at some of those sites, which were an absolute clusterfuck of nested tables. Flash was like a playground compared to the restrictive environment of building in HTML and CSS in those days, and it seemed like every client project I worked on was very different in its function and UX.
Fast-forward to today, and even with what we can do with modern web technologies, if you look at many sites these days, they're all pretty much the same - especially if they're sales sites. They all use a very familiar cookie-cutter style format. You know the sites I'm talking about; top nav bar, hero image with a wanky quote, 3-block row outlining the nifty features, a call-to-action button etc.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautiful sites come about in the post-Flash era, and some pretty nifty effects (parallax movement seemed to gain a lot of popularity for a time). I think that modern web design really just shows how far we've come in terms of optimisation.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Most of this has come about because we've all spent collective time and effort to get here and discovered what works best for users (in most cases) what converts sales the easiest, etc. It's a culmination of the evolution of tooling, frameworks, boilerplates and various styles we've all built with along the way that continues to evolve.
We know through other mediums and media that users like familiarity (The Mere-exposure effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect), and so, the web ends up all looking the same as well because more familiarity equals fewer barriers and distractions and hopefully more sales/conversions/eyeballs.
Contrast that with the first pure HTML sites I created, which were built with tables and frames. I shudder thinking back at some of those sites, which were an absolute clusterfuck of nested tables. Flash was like a playground compared to the restrictive environment of building in HTML and CSS in those days, and it seemed like every client project I worked on was very different in its function and UX.
Fast-forward to today, and even with what we can do with modern web technologies, if you look at many sites these days, they're all pretty much the same - especially if they're sales sites. They all use a very familiar cookie-cutter style format. You know the sites I'm talking about; top nav bar, hero image with a wanky quote, 3-block row outlining the nifty features, a call-to-action button etc.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen some beautiful sites come about in the post-Flash era, and some pretty nifty effects (parallax movement seemed to gain a lot of popularity for a time). I think that modern web design really just shows how far we've come in terms of optimisation.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Most of this has come about because we've all spent collective time and effort to get here and discovered what works best for users (in most cases) what converts sales the easiest, etc. It's a culmination of the evolution of tooling, frameworks, boilerplates and various styles we've all built with along the way that continues to evolve.
We know through other mediums and media that users like familiarity (The Mere-exposure effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect), and so, the web ends up all looking the same as well because more familiarity equals fewer barriers and distractions and hopefully more sales/conversions/eyeballs.