Flash Pearls serves as an inspirational database of creativity for Flash designers. Each year, there are a few well respected Flash design awards in various design magazines and conferences, but those only come but once a year. Flash Pearls looks to showcase the most well designed and executed Flash sites right now, not 6 months later when the fast-paced design world has moved on.

The websites featured here are those that display excellent use of Flash by enhancing the user experience. This is not the place to find games, animations, or the week's popular email foward/IM profile site of silliness, that's what HomeStarRunner.com and NewGrounds.com are for. That's not to say a website can't include games, animation, or humor, but the focus is on design.

Each featured site must:

• Be well-designed
• Feature Flash elements or be entirely created in Flash
• Impressive ActionScript skills will help, but are not required

Special recognition is given to sites that support web standards. To qualify as a "Standards Compliant" site on Flash Pearls, the website must be coded in valid XHTML and use CSS for page layout (no tables). Those familiar with web standards know that a true "standards compliant" site goes beyond that. Max Design has put together an excellent web standards checklist that I'd love to hold all sites accountable to, but I don't have the time to check every little detail.

More importantly, I hope Flash Pearls can make a significant impact in the movement to spread the word on web standards to the design community. Learning about and applying web standards to your work not only increases your value in the web design market, it increases the value of the web as a whole. When web standards and Flash come together, beautiful things can happen. For more information about web standards, check out the Resources section.

John Riviello
Web/Flash Designer
Washington DC, USA

Everyone and everything I encounter inspires me, but I only have so much space here and even less time to keep your attention span. My Flash interest and skills would not be where they are today if it weren't for the first two people who introduced me to Flash, went out of their way to show me its power, and then let me run wild: Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Wade Ryer. You helped make me the Flash-crazed web designer I am today, so to you, I offer a big "thanks."