John Schlemmer

John Schlemmer is a Motion Lead at Google in

Mountain View, California. He directs cross-platform animation efforts in Google apps from

within the Material Design team while also

writing about, lecturing on, and advocating for

industry standards in animation.

schlem.me

Honestly, I wouldn't have my career if it wasn't for Flash. I started out in the early 2000’s doing a lot of static web. Soon after, I discovered Flash—which was a big thing back then—and started making simple animated cartoon videos. They were terrible if I look at them now but from there I moved on and started developing my own creative perspective and making my own things. Experiments with cartoons inspired me to apply Flash animations to UI.

In 2013 I began doing work at an agency that was curating the promotion of the recently released Moto X phone and there was a lot of UI design involved in its marketing campaign. I started animating UI through After Effects, which is something I didn't actually do before, but I found I really liked it. I had much more control than in Flash. I became hugely interested in it and reached out to Google (by that time they had purchased Motorola), who had some available positions for UI animators. I came in right when UI animation and mobile was starting to be a thing.

Flash was great because it introduced animation in an interactive sense, yet it also offered lots of non-functional decoration. Motion and UI design got more than just eye-candy in 2007 when the first iPhone was released. It was a brand new thing with so many ways of interacting with OS and apps that users needed extra help understanding the flow of it all. That was the tipping point when mobile UI became more useful—more a necessity than decoration.

In April of 2010 Steve Jobs published an open letter called "Thoughts on Flash" in which he explained why Apple would not allow Flash in its products. That was a really tough point because back then I was still working in Flash. And by that time HTML5 wasn’t even close to being able to replicate what Flash could do.

However I think ultimately it was the right move, and brought positive changes. First, Flash was a very bloated software: it required a special plugin and was very battery-hungry on mobile devices, which thwarted the progress of mobile web. Second, Steve’s letter pushed people to put their best efforts into HTML5.