How to Create Interactive Buttons With Adobe Flash

The addition of interactive buttons can add a bit of style and fun to your website. These buttons, created using Adobe Flash, can be designed to change colors, play sounds or generate any combination of special effects. Using Flash to create these buttons is fairly simple, and results can be extremely gratifying.

Instructions

1. Know what you're going to create before creating it. Flash interactive buttons are actually four frames of movie clips laid out in a timeline, so it's important that you know in advance what you want each frame to do.

2. Open Flash and choose Insert > New Symbol from the dropdown menu. enter a name for the symbol in the Create New Symbol dialog box and for Behavior, choose "button." A timeline header will open up displaying four frames, showing the four states needed to create the button: Up, Over, Down and Hit.

3. Create the Up state image by either drawing, importing or selecting another symbol from the menu, or Stage. Use the movie clip symbol if you want the button to be animated.

4. Hit the "Over" frame and choose "Insert Keyframe," which duplicates the image you created in the Up frame. At this point you can change the image's color, or other aspects of the button you created in the Up frame.

5. Repeat the process for the Down and Hit frames. The Hit frame defines the area of the image that will respond when clicked, so it's important that its graphic be larger than those displayed in the three previous stages.

6. Move the button in the Hit frame to a different location to create a rollover effect, which changes its appearance to another graphic on the Stage. Or add a sound to the button by selecting the frame in the timeline, choosing Window > Properties and selecting a sound from the sound menu in the property inspector.

7. Choose Edit > Edit Document and drag the button you created onto your page or movie.