Now that we have imported our portfolio project Photoshop file into Adobe Flash Catalyst, we are ready to work on the navigation for our portfolio. We will build the pages or states for our project and turn our imported graphics into button components in Flash Catalyst.

Open your PortfolioLayout.psd portfolio project file into Catalyst and let's take a look around. At first glance, you will see that the workspace is not as intimidating as the Flash workspace.

Adobe Flash Catalyst simplifies and enhances the design process, allowing the designer to take the design to the next level by adding the front-end interactive features such as buttons, text input boxes, image transitions and more.

Now that we have our storyboard and design elements ready, we are going to start working on the first part of the ecard envelope animation. The first thing we will do is make a motion path.

Here are a few things that you might need to know when working with the drawing tools in Flash CS4.

Continuing on with our ecard project, we will get a little more practice with the Object Drawing mode and Flash filters as we draw the rest of our animation elements.

In this tutorial, we will draw the back of our envelope and cut out a triangular opening. Because we need to cut out the triangle shape from the rectangular envelope shape, this is a good time to use the Merge Drawing mode in Flash.

Now that we have drawn the objects for the envelope and stamp, we can add a few extra touches to make the envelope look more realistic. In this tutorial, you will learn how to apply Flash filters to our envelope and store our custom filter in the Preset Library.

Now that we have decided on the graphics for our envelope animation, we are ready to start drawing them. In the next few tutorials, we will learn about both of Flash’s drawing modes, adding filters and placing symbols in the Library.

Flash skills from drawing vector shapes and applying filters to animating with the new object-based Flash animation and loading the main ecard animation as an external swf. This project will be an intro animation with design elements that can be customized to match any ecard.