I know it's not without its place in the realm of online design, but I really hate Flash. Case in point: the new Holiday Storybook promotion from Banana Republic. The "book" contains four chapters about modern holiday miracles with images of clothing and price details on each page. The idea and the book itself are fine, but the whole thing is rendered in Flash. This makes things a bit fancier, but reading a story in Flash is too time consuming, and while the stories included in the Holiday Storybook are cute and all, they're not nearly engaging enough for me to wait patiently as each page loads. Flash can work great in many cases, but here it just felt superfluous.