On another thread, I mentioned I’d seen some bad flash visualizations on the web in my time, and Hillary suggested I post a whole new thread on it here.

My goal is to learn from past mistakes, so let’s start with one of my own, from Scientific American.

Technically I didn’t have anything to do with this particular piece of interactivity, and I don’t mean to assail the hard work that went into it—but I do think of it as a good example of what I might call “beginner flash”—when the temptation is to create something that operates like a museum kiosk, with all the pitfalls that implies – robbing users of the ability to link to individual elements (if it had been build with DHTML, say) and just sort of forcing interactivity where perhaps a video or some other presentation would have done as well…

5 Goals for Exploring the Solar System (Scientific American)