Gabocorp: a Flashy Flashback to 1997

Back in the late ’90s I was still getting my head around the whole web design thing, and almost exclusively working for a local firm on car-related sites. Their planning and consultation process often amounted to handing me a brochure (if I was lucky; I once had to base a design demo on branding described in a phone call), but they were nice people who gave this hopeless n00b a chance.

One day they saw a shiny new Flash site called Gabocorp, and it had a huge impact; suddenly they wanted impressive motion graphics, despite the budgets, creative process and my inexperience making that an unrealistic goal. Eventually, after some awful spinning/fading logos, I did produce two well-illustrated, brand-appropriate, tastefully-animated sites that carefully combined Flash with HTML… and the clients hated them. But it got me into Flash, and I learned a lot about how vital it is to involve creative people in the sales and consultation processes.

Anyway, we didn’t really enter a new era in website design, and people soon got sick of excessive Flash, but Gabocorp was certainly groundbreaking and influential. Gabo Mendoza’s site currently has a conventional blog layout, but he’s planning to switch it to an all-Flash interface.

Fri 23rd Nov 2007, 1:10pm GMT

Filed under: Client-side Coding, Design, Games and Multimedia, Web

Comments

yay Gabocorp.
flipping heck, flash site message boards were full with people asking how to build a flash site that works like Gabocorp for about 4 years after that site was launched.
a great blast from the past.

— bleepbloop, 6th Dec, 7:51am

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Matt Round’s company blog, covering web development, media, technology and pretty much anything else.

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