“Suddenly function and beauty starts to blend naturally.”

A special thing happens when designers open up to code, or when coders gain a deeper grasp of design. Suddenly function and beauty start to blend naturally. This is where interaction design shines both as a creative pursuit and a craft

—Amit Pitaru, new Co-Chair of the MFA Interaction Design department, SVA

Some of you old school web designers out there will recognize Amit. He’s the co-creator of InsertSilence and an early experimenter in interactive design and art in the early 2000’s and someone who’s work I admired when I first started my career in web design.
Yes, Flash has gone out of fashion and wasn’t designed to make the jump to mobile computing, but the work Pitaru created would not have been possible without Flash. He, along with many other digital artists like James Paterson (creator of Presstube) and Joshua Davis (creator of PrayStation) helped lay the groundwork for for all the so-called ‘progressive’ interactions we’re now seeing done with JavaScript and HTML5.
Praising the great work being done in HTML and JavaScript today without acknowledging the work these guys did over 10 years ago in Flash is like being a fan of The White Stripes without knowing who Led Zeppelin was.

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