My First Agency Was Built in Flash

There is a version of me preserved in amber on the Wayback Machine. December 2000. A black void, and floating in the middle of it a giant chrome dial — blue orb at the centre, bronze-gradient panels orbiting it, every button bevelled within an inch of its life and crowned with a little lens-flared sphere. All lowercase, obviously. It was the website of 2cubed web productions, my first agency, and I thought it was the most sophisticated thing anyone had ever made.

The /flash/ build in motion, twenty-five years on.

Two offices and a chrome orb

2cubed started in 1999, while I was meant to be studying multimedia computing at Westminster. The footer of that Flash site claims two offices — Upper Chorlton Road in Old Trafford and Ladbroke Grove in London — which sounds impressive until you know what was actually at those addresses. The London phone number still starts 0181, which dates the site to the months before the Big Number change in April 2000. We were selling the future on a phone number that was about to be deprecated.

The navigation read like a manifesto of everything a web agency could possibly be in 1999: concept, design, clients, hosting, e-commerce. Hosting! We resold server space and called it a service line. Under e-commerce sat two sub-items — security and on-line catalogues, hyphen and all — because that is what you had to promise people before they would put a credit card form on the internet.

With the rapid growth of the Internet community, e-commerce has already become an established alternative to traditional retail methods.

That was the copy rotating in the centre of the orb. Twenty-five years later it reads like a parody of corporate futurism, but here is the thing: in 1999 you genuinely had to argue this. We were two decades early to a claim that turned out to be the understatement of the century.

Flash was a place, not a plugin

Everything on that page was built in Flash 4. No CSS layout, no responsive breakpoints, no accessibility tree — a single SWF in a black HTML page, drawn frame by frame on a timeline. Motion tweens for the orbiting panels. Rollover states hand-built as keyframes. A preloader, because at 56k that interface took longer to arrive than most pages take to fully hydrate today.

The archive still holds a file called lyrical flightv4.swf. Version four. No git, no version control of any kind — just Save As with a number bolted on, the universal versioning system of everyone who learned to ship before they learned to engineer. I have no memory of versions one through three, which probably means they deserved to be overwritten.

It is fashionable to remember Flash as a mistake the web made — and the plugin deserved to die. But inside that timeline you controlled everything: type, motion, sound, the exact choreography of how an interface revealed itself. Nobody handed you a design system. You invented one, badly, every single project, and in doing so you learned what every part of an interface was actually for.

What survived the plugin

2cubed did not make me rich and it did not outlast the era that produced it. What it did was set the shape of everything since. The job I do now — brand identity, product design and the systems underneath them, one operator across the whole stack — is recognisably the same job as 1999. Concept, design, clients, hosting, e-commerce. The nav items just got better names.

• Motion is language, not decoration. Flash taught that before CSS could animate anything.

• Owning the whole build — design through deployment — was the original full-stack design engineering. We just called it being a web agency with two people in it.

• Selling the obvious early feels identical to selling the absurd. E-commerce in 1999, AI deployment in 2026. The copy barely changes.

• Ship it with a version number in the filename if you have to. Version four exists because versions one to three got finished.

The site survives only because a crawler happened to wander past Old Trafford's corner of the internet 26 times between 1999 and 2007. Most of what I have made since has died quieter deaths — agencies fold, platforms sunset, plugins get end-of-lifed. The work that lasts is not the artefact. It is the instinct the artefact trained into you.

Still: look at that chrome orb. They do not make antipatterns like that any more.