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Flash is powerful. Using it properly, you can create stunning visual experience and offer your visitors incredible user interaction. Although Flash is definitely not the favourite medium for usability and accessibility advocates, it has its advantages. With Flash designers can achieve results which simply aren’t possible with (X)HTML and CSS. Whether you like Flash or not, it empowers the Web with functionalities which make it an incredibly interactive medium.

Flash-based web-sites can look not like web-sites at all; Flash-designers tend to use colorful, dynamic, loud and extremely vibrant approaches, with effects and animation, music and videos, stunning visual elements and interactive navigation menus. Below you’ll find some examples of creative, beautiful, shocking, unusual, but always outstanding Flash-based designs.

You might also want to take a look at the articles

• 65 Excellent Flash Designs which features 65 examples of outstanding Flash-based web-sites.
• Showcase Of Creative Flash Preloaders which may serve as an inspiration for your Flash-projects.
• Adobe Flash Tutorials: Best Of with hand-picked professional Flash tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works.

[By the way, did you know there is a brand new Smashing Wordpress Book? Push WordPress past its limits!]

Advertising and Games

To attract consumers site owners often tend to use some visually appealing Flash-solutions, 3D-experience with sounds and graphics motion is usual. Games are another option worth considering.

Intel’s Robo Brawl game. Very beautiful and interactive design.

Oh, By The Way — this is how an effective album promotion web-site should look like.

Good things — an advertising-project of the company “Orange”. Be pPrepare to endlessly scroll to the bottom of the page.

Neon Bible: Arcade Fires interactive video-clip. Dont forget to click.

Build your wild self — have you ever created a person with animal features? Well, maybe you should. A promotional site for New York zoos.

Farm Rio presents a truly excellent Flash-design, but what is it actually?

Zune — more vivid colors for a boring product.

iDecorabilit — decorating furniture online. Beautiful concept, interesting design.

Agatha — a distinctive, personal, minimalistic and beautiful design.

Sir Patroclo — take it easy, tiger. This little guy at the bottom should get some rest.

Halo3 — interactive Flash at its best. Excellent visual experience.

CDX — very sinematic and beautiful Flash-based game. One of those you-wake-up-in-a-room-and-you-have-to-escape games. Beautiful!

Art & Experiments

Typography Kicks Ass — some fun with Flickr-images.

Masayuki Kido seems to be pretty brave. Visitors can make a ball out of him. Don’t forget to click on his face.

Serge Tretiakov offers an interesting combination of scrolling and background motion. Pretty unusual design, maybe even disturbing.

A photographer Bernhard Wolff has a Flash-layout which is simply impossible to achieve with CSS and (X)HTML.

Sergey Tyukanovs Museum of Art — here “gallery” actually means “gallery”.

Eye-Project is an impressive animated collaborative mosaic. Including a variety of preloading time required to see the site.

Zoomquilt Part II — you can walk across the planet going deeper into the image. Zoomquilt is also a collaborative project.

Bigo and Twigetti — who would have guessed that? Bigo and Twigetti are musicians from London.

(Web)-Designers & Design Agencies

Opulentes by Nitrogenix. We bet you’ve never seen something like this before.

Progetty Design Studio — oh-oh, take it easy, buddy.

Atsushi Watanabe — very calm, peaceful and beautiful design.

Mohammad Rahimi doesn’t use a lot of space. The site is still extremely dynamic and interactive.

Max Shaman delivers something… strange. You can play with the doll and needles if you like to.

Clusta has many lines, interactive lines, exploding lines and flying lines.

Xcel Media seems to love the spreadsheet.

An illustrator Chu Keng Fu from Taiwan showcases his art…

…and his colleague Martin Haake has his own understanding of a modern web design.

The Science — finally some vivid colors!

Communicator World — a little bit too playful.

No-Idea has some pretty nice ideas. A design from Thailand.

Saizen Media Studios presents some splendid animated scenes.

MiniGorille.com — best viewed in the fullscreen-mode.

Esja — so many colorful notes!

Kraftvoll — creativity from France.

Amautalab — a design agency with sweet plastic characters.

Aardman Animations — home, sweet home…

Something Completely Different

Manuell Dall’olio interacts with site visitors using his own hands. That’s not really beautiful, but creative.