Fliiip Book Revives Flash-Era Accessibility With a Simple Browser Animation Tool

Designer, artist, and composer Jonathan Andrew Myers has launched Fliiip Book, a simple, browser-based animation app that lets users create two-second looping GIFs with ease. Lightweight and intuitive, the app channels the quick, expressive energy of early 2000s Flash tools.

The below GIF took us less than a minute to create, if you can believe it.

For Myers, Fliiip Book’s development stems from a lifelong passion for creativity and a love for building tools that help others express themselves. “The feeling of bringing something new into the world is like light and air for me,” he says. In creating PaintList.com as a resource for traditional artists and the web-based drawing app Drawww Time, he dove deep into web technologies and hasn’t stopped.

The spark for Fliiip Book came from a desire to recapture the immediacy of Flash animation. “It was so fast to whip up an animation and post it to one of the many Flash havens like Newgrounds, etc. All of that changed in the 2010s when iPhones became fairly common and they didn’t support Flash.”

Myers kept the interface minimal on purpose. “I wanted Fliiip Book to be the same way. Just start animating. Not too many tools or complexity.” While he originally planned for four seconds of animation, “24 frames seemed good for the initial launch.”

Even in its early days, the app is already evolving thanks to user feedback. “I’ve changed the onion-skinning icon to be an onion… the export button is more obvious now… I’m considering adjusting the number of frames, frame rate, a marquee and lasso tool, and of course adding color.”

But for Myers, Fliiip Book’s simplicity is also part of its charm: “Sometimes it’s those limitations that make a thing great.”