Indesign and Flash: making web banner ads
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Indesign seems to be the perfect place to make my series of web banners from the assets I have made for the print ads I’ve already done. I can even have a multi-page document for each of the banner ad sizes I want and I can quickly and easily make up the multi-lingual versions of the same right there in the document. I can apply basic animation and transitions (which is all I want) and I can export an SWF which I can use where Flash is available online.
BUT … here’s where I need some help with Flash (CS6, which accepts Indesign FLAs). I’d like to quickly and easily make animated GIFs as fallbacks for my adverts.
I was able to save a simple single instance of animation as a FLA, open it in Flash, save as a MOV then convert it to a GIF in Photoshop.
But exporting an Indesign document with two delayed animations in it as a FLA from Indesign loses some of the ActionScript timings somehow, and I get a junk Flash animation half the time.
Indesign is so close to being a super place to batch make all my banner ads from my print ads, all within Creative Cloud. But not quite. Anyone got any tips for how to quickly get animated GIFs out of my Indesign animations?
Regards,
Pete
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So the most successful method I have found yet … export SWF from Indesign … convert to MP4 at http://www.flash-banner-converter.com … convert to GIF in Photoshop.
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Ah boo … that whole project has been scotched since Indesign doesn’t let you stack or customise animations. Even a simple, appear, pause, disappear is not available (although fly in, pause, fly out is!) … I could mess with the IDML snippets https://creativepro.com/animation-customization-via-idml.php … or am I just better off doing all this in Edge Animate or Flash? (Losing my ability to have multiple page sizes open in one document and also simply cut and paste my print elements?)
Indesign was so nearly a great place to make print ads into web ads. Not quite though.
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You can do a lot more using animations than you’d think, but you have to get creative. For example, check out this tutorial:
https://creativepro.com/build-a-moving-bike-using-flash-in-indesign-part-1.phpHere’s another clue:
https://creativepro.com/using-reverse-to-slide-in-and-slide-out-an-animation.phpSandee Cohen and Diane Burns will be covering all kinds of animation tips and tricks at PePcon this year (https://pepcon.com)
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I even have trouble getting people in the studio to let me make flat layouts for web in InDesign, due to the lack of a Save For Web option. They insist everything is done in Photoshop. I get round it by not telling them I am laying out in InDesign and then exporting to Photoshop and saving down there. I might tell them I am making Flash banners in ID now, just to see their faces.
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Salieri: That’s great! InDesign is a layout program. Photoshop is not a layout program, but people think you should use it as a layout tool. InDesign is the obvious choice, in my opinion, for laying out anything that involves text and graphics.
I have been pushing Adobe for years for a true InDesign-to-Photoshop (or InDesign to Illustrator) workflow that would maintain layers. For example, wouldn’t it be great if we could export as PSD? Or if Photoshop could open a PDF file and maintain the layers?
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