Flash sites were once the epitome of technology and creativity, and despite being much maligned by Apple in recent years, there is still plenty of life left in a high quality flash site. Whether they were created to entertain, educate, or promote a product, classic examples of flash sites can still steal hours from one’s day.

Music

(Images via burn-studios, incredibox)

Hardcore musicians will love Burn Studios, a site that allows one to have their own digital recording studio. The beautifully rendered buttons and dials lend a highly realistic feel to the entire process. For a more laid back and fun music-making session, it’s fun to try out Incredibox, a beat boxing simulator full of French charicatures.

For the Kids!

(Images via hasbro, buildyourwildself)

Most sites are not incredibly kid friendly, but Hasbro and Build Your Wild Self are exceptions. The first site lets one play classic board games on the computer, while the second allows a kid to express their creativity while learning about animals at the zoo.

Games

(Images via cdx-thegame, gettheglass)

Flash games aren’t all shooting spaceships and racing cars. CDX is a dark point and click that starts one out in a room with no apparent exit… while Get the Glass is a thinly veiled sponsorship for milk that has some surprisingly quality art.

Making Faces

(Images via flashface, mono-1)

If one fancies themselves a great portrait artist, these may be the sites for you. Flash Face is an incredibly robust face creation tool that allows one to come up with a funny portrait within minutes, or an eerily realistic one over a longer time period. Monoface is just plain fun. Created by an agency, this face shuffle mixes different parts of the agency’s employees faces into a million hilarious combinations.

Educational

(Images via wechoosethemoon, history)

Want a little more substance while browsing the internet at work? We Choose the Moon is an immersive experience that carries one through the entire moon launch process from lift off to landing. Civil War 150 celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with clean style and interestingly interactive infographics.

Decorating Help

(Images via colorschemedesigner, idecorabili)

Not many people know their way around a color wheel anymore, and now there’s no need! With the help of Color Scheme Designer, one can simply pick a color they like, and they’re presented with an entire color scheme that is perfectly complimentary. Idecorabili is a fun way to choose the color of one’s cabinet from home, before ordering it from the company. If only every online retailer made choosing colors this much fun!

Color Fun

(Images via weavesilk, flashmonkey, wonderfl, koalastothemax)

Bored for a moment, and want to add some color to the day? Try out Weave Silk, a pretty and easy way to fool around with beautiful light. Flash Monkey’s Colorwall is of an equal bent, while Wonderfl allows one to swirl colors into beautiful formations, and Koalas to the Max creates an oddly enjoyable experience that involves hovering over different circles and watching them split into a million more.

Artistic Tendencies?

(Images via jacksonpollock, zefrank, sketchswap)

In the mood to share art with the world? If one wants to splash paint around without the mess, Jackson Pollock is a great destination. In the mood to draw, but don’t have the time or the talent? Ze Frank’s Scribbler has the hook up. Sketchswap is a really fun idea – make a sketch and click submit, and someone else will receive your image, as you receive one from another random stranger.

Virtual Travel

(Images via pixelcase, theircircularlife)

Want to explore a European city without leaving the cubicle? Their Circular Life is the site for you. It allows one to watch the day go by in several spots throughout the world. If one would prefer staying in the US, take a high flying tour of New York City with the help of Pixelcase.

It’s every Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist’s dream: getting a microscopic look at Leonardo’s brushstrokes on The Last Supper down to the tiniest flake of paint. In the past, you would have to be a highly skilled art preservationist to gain such intimate access to treasured art, but the wonder of high-resolution photography has now brought it to the internet.

The Italian project Haltadefinizione has put 10 of the most iconic images of the Italian Renaissance online in a flash interface that allows you to click and zoom on any part of Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Leonardo’s Annunciation and The Last Supper, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Verrochio and Leonardo’s The Baptism of Christ, Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Life Stories of Christ, Pontormo’s Deposition, Agnolo Bronzino’s Elanor of Toledo and Francesco Paolo Michetti’s The Daughter of Iorio.

The images may be watermarked, but for painters and art lovers, they provide an invaluable up-close-and-personal view that could never be reproduced by a print or even a trip to the museum to see the work in person. It’s quite amazing to see not just the intricacies to a long-dead master artist’s ways of applying paint to a canvas, but how the paint has aged over centuries.

The clarity of the images also brings out details that many may not have noticed before, even in a painting they’ve seen hundreds of times. For example, in Leonardo’s Annuncation, it’s now possible to see all the little windows and turrets in a distant city that simply aren’t visible when viewing the painting full-scale.
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Gone are the days when a slow-loading Flash intro gave websites cool points, but failed to serve a real purpose. Flash is now an integral element of some of the most visually stimulating, engaging websites on the ‘net, allowing users to be active participants in the content of the site. Animations, games, virtual exploration and dazzling transition effects make these 15 Flash websites stand out as creative, interesting and fun.

Mauricio Guimaraes

When you arrive at illustrator and web designer Mauricio Guimaraes’ website, you’re in for an interactive journey across a strange and fantastical landscape featuring pencils, pen nibs, artist palettes and more. Fly across the land with your mouse and click on the mountain/head (whose eyes move along with your cursor) to read about Guimaraes, the bundle of writing instruments for his portfolio or the big pile of telecommunications equipment to contact the artist.

Wonderwall

The portfolio of interior design firm Wonderwall almost seems like a living being when you’re moving your mouse across it; it responds astonishingly fluid movement and little sound effects that sound like drips of water. And while it may seem as if such a design would eclipse the portfolio itself, in this case it incites the viewer to stay and peruse and play much longer than they would on a traditional portfolio website.

National Grid Floe

Improve your carbon footprint, or the baby polar bear gets it. That’s basically the gist of London-based utility company National Grid’s website, though it’s actually fun to navigate the site and get a reaction out of the bears. Make friends with a bear cub, name it, and as you answer environmental impact quiz questions correctly, you get to play with it and increase its health.

Get the Glass

For most kids, when cookies are out of the equation, drinking a glass of milk is more of a chore than a treat. But the Got Milk? campaign is drawing kids in with a Flash-based interactive flash board game on its website that’s surprisingly sophisticated. The aim is to “briefly put your daily morals aside” and help a family of milk-craving fugitives break into an island fort to get the last glass of milk.

Waterlife

A documentary called WaterLife tells “the story of the last great supply of fresh drinking water on earth”: the Great Lakes. With a soothing color scheme, plenty of animation, 3D effects and the opportunity to interact, this website serves as a strong companion to the film.

Dojo SF

The Dojo SF intro page slowly unfolds to reveal a strange but spellbinding jumble of arcane imagery, while the individual pages use seamless transitions and scrolling to offer quick and easy access to all of the site’s important info.

The Eco Zoo

With stunning Papervision effects and a really fun, interactive flash interface, it’s no wonder the Eco Zoo website won “FWA Site of the Year” in 2009. The designer, Junichi Nakazawa of ENJIN Inc, says “The Eco Zoo is our attempt at creating communication that is easily and enjoyable understood by people of all generations and nationalities, while pushing the envelope of online creative expression.”

Falcon’s Treehouse

Falcon’s Treehouse is a creative services firm that designs and produces what they call “themed experiences”, so it’s only fitting that their own website is an experience unto itself that unfolds as you interact with it. The more you play with the site, the more strange new landscapes begin to reveal themselves – night turns into day, patterns appear, blurry images are sharpened.

Record Tripping

It starts with a scratch of a record, and gets more complex – and fun – from there. The Bell Brothers’ interactive browser game ‘Record Tripping’ turns your computer mouse into a turntable, inciting you to use your mouse’s scroll function to for a series of challenges that also involve Alice in Wonderland, The Gorillaz, Death Cab for Cutie and Weezer. It’s not quite as strange as it sounds, but fun to play.

Breathe Architecture

The Breathe Architecture website doesn’t do anything wild, but sometimes, simplicity can be so refreshing – especially when there are so many Flash websites out there that are cluttered with unnecessary fluff. In fact, for a Flash site, this is downright minimalist, with a design that’s easy to navigate, intuitive and ultra-responsive.

Hobnox Audiotool

On the other end of the spectrum – in a good way – is the Hobnox Audiotool website, a browser-based Flash audio production tool that allows you to wire together various types of effects to create music in real time, in your own little virtual studio. Laymans Reviews calls it “one of the most productive ways of wasting time on the web”.

DVEIN 2009

Barcelona-based motion and interactive studio DVEIN, responsible for the title sequences in a number of movies and television projects like Spiderman 3, displays their work in an eye-catching wheel of images. Once clicked, many of those images are animated – and from there, a video opens to display the work in full.

Help the Honeybees

Honeybee populations around the world are disappearing at an alarming rate, and Haagen-Dazs is letting everyone know with their program Help the Honeybees. Their interactive Flash website allows you to take your very own honeybee on a journey through a buzzing field full of pollen-packed plants to learn more about the plight of bees.

Edwin Murat Ganter

Illustrator and web designer Edwin Murat Ganter shows off his skills using flash images of his work scrolling across a television screen.  Nothing stands as a truer sense of a web designer’s work than his own website, and this one is creative and functional.

Monoface

“Simpler is better.” That’s what advertising agency Mono is trying to get across with their awesome flash website that doesn’t do much more than allow users to create bizarre faces from disparate parts. But get sucked in trying to come up with the funniest combinations (there are 759,375 possibilities), and you’ll get the message.

From contextual photo searching tools to shooting cats out of cannons, this list has a little something for everyone. Consider this a Sunday break from our normally more in-depth articles and extensive image collections. Some are useful, some are silly, but it’s the weekend: sit back and relax.

Flickr Related Tag Browser: This neat tool lets you surf Flickr in ‘tag space,’ which provides both interesting train-of-thought tangents and powerful search capabilities. Simply input an initial keyword or phrase and see a selection of results, or move to other related tags and continue your search.

Click Anywhere and Draw: It is remarkable how many different patterns you create create with this simple little tool. As you begin to draw the drawing rotates in 3D. Then, when you’re ready, you can put it into full spin and render very complex and delicate patterns out of raw sketch markings on the page.

The Kitten Cannon: Somewhat sadistic to be sure, but a surprisingly complex series of things can happen to this cat along its journey – from trampolines to giant venus fly trap plants. It would be nice if there were at least some eventualities in which the kitten actually survived.

Bunny Bell Hopping: Not sure about the Kitten Cannon? Fair enough. Though the game seems cute and innocent, it is fairly challenging keeping that bunny in the air. Once he has lift-off, the goal is to bounce him from bell to bell without missing a step.

You Are a … Who Likes to: Spin the wheel and see what comes up, one result at a time. To be honest, this one gets old pretty fast, but is good for a laugh or two before you move on.

Crazy Rabbit: The direct interactivity and complex gestures built into the rabbit make this game of keep-away somehow surprisingly entertaining. Once the rabbit grabs your cursor it is hard to shake him loose. And once he is loose, he watches the cursor like a hawk until it comes close enough again.

Do Not Press This Button: This one has been floating around for a while, but it is truly addictive the first time around. It’s hard to not take the challenge over and over again as the red button shifts in size, taunts the user, multiplies and changes through each iteration.

Classic 80’s Arcade Games: Did we say seven ways to waste time online? Well, consider this a bonus one then! If you can’t get enough of 2d originals, this is the site for you. Many of the game are available right online and the others are free to download. Instructions are displayed as the game is loading and there are lots to choose from, including Frogger, Asteroids and more.