Flash Best Practices

When you work on Flash documents, it is important to keep the structure neat, clean, and accessible in all aspects of flash environment no matter you work alone or as part of a team. This post is to give you some guidelines about Timelines and the library.

Flash Timeline structure

• Name layers in meaningful way (see the below samples to compare good and bad Timeline structures) and avoid using default layer names (such as layer 1, layer 2, etc.) which cannot tell you anything.
• Use layer folders when there are more than 10 layers.
• Try to keep the number of layers as low as possible.
• Put all actions and frame labels in one layer: e.g. “actions” layer, do not put any other object on this layer.

Flash Library Structure

• Name objects in meaningful way (see the below samples to compare good and bad library structures) and avoid using default object names (such as Symbol 1, Symbol 2, Tween 1, etc.) which cannot give you any information about the object.
• Use library folders and group related objects when there are more than 20 objects in the library (see the below sample to compare bad design and good practices)
• Delete unused items to keep the library clean.

It is always necessary to have a good structure for both Timeline and the library. This way you can get a lot of benefits than you can think of such as reuse flash assets effectively, save time, and no more frustrations about finding needed objects.

If you are a flash beginner, you should have read A Flash Journalism Presentation by Mindy McAdams which covers very good points about the Timeline and motion tweening. It is very easy for you to learn as the presentation is clearly demonstrated by screen captures.

If you wish to learn further about flash best practices to become a flash professional, there is also another great article written by Jen deHaan from Adobe which covers quite a lot of things in term of organizing ActionScripts, behaviors conventions, screens conventions, video conventions, accessibility, version control guidelines, and optimizations for performance. The article is suitable for beginner or intermediate level.