The Flypaper buzz

After reading all the hype about flypaper, I decided to give their do it yourself digital sign-age platform a shot.

From flypaper.com "The Flypaper Platform is a cost effective solution to generate high-quality Flash and video content for digital signage networks without custom programming, big budgets and long production schedules. "

So there you have it, build your own flash presentations for Digital Signage without having to hire a professional designer or developer. But as a professional Designer I asked myself, is this software for me too?

After building my own presentation in flypaper (making sure to investigate every possible button and dialog box) my initial impression was that this was a slick little piece of software. But after watching the horrid presentation I created play over and over, I started to question the purpose of it.

Flypaper is a very very power point inspired program, albeit more intuitive and pleasing to look at. However that's just it, with all the pre-built animations, buttons and transitions to use that's just what your going to end up getting, a very power point looking presentation from the 90s. While you can customize some of these items, it is very limiting in comparison to flash. So as a designer my tendency would be to construct different elements like backgrounds, buttons and animations with your standard adobe products and import them into flypaper and use it as a composer of sorts to get away from the power pointy look and feel. Which then raised some questions. Whats the point? Will it save me any time? It does create simple buttons and flash transitions quicker than flash, but usually this is only a fraction of the time involved in creating a presentation. Most of the time is spent creating custom graphics, editing video clips, pulling dynamic data (xml, rss twitter you name it) ect. So why wouldn't I just do this all this in flash and save all the headache of trying to introduce one more program into the mix of content creation.

After consulting other professional designers on their thoughts, I was left to think only one thing. Cool, but not for me. Unless of course its free :) Now back to the main target audience "non-designers". Frankly it kind of makes me sick to my stomach thinking that this stuff could catch on to non-designers. There is already an over abundance of bad flash animations by less than par designers out on the web. That's just what we need now, this stuff seeping into he digital signage industry with even less competent people creating content. I work for a digital sign-age company, and we started back in the early 90s giving customers the content creation software, but after doing on site visits we noticed that the displays looked absolutely horrid and quickly yanked complete control from the customers limiting them to update specific zones of a screen themselves.

The Flypaper buzz states that its going to be a "game changer" in the digital signage industry.

I think there are a few designers out their that might adopt it simply because they just can't get the hang of flash, but other then that I think the main audience is going to be for non-designers.

It will have great appeal to people trying to deploy signage on a budget. However, do you really want Sally from HR creating content and exposing how unprofessional you really are?

A commenter from CNET summed up it up well:

The client buys a finished production … or they can buy a handy cam and shoot it themselves. We don’t have a problem with this, because we know that the next time they want to do a video production, or a Flash animation, they’ll come back to someone who knows how to do it right.