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.