I have been working on Flash games professionally for two years now and somehow, having our artists producing assets the right way is one of our biggest challenge.

More precisely, it is very hard to have them following any kind of structure and/or standards, nor taking into consideration performance. I would say also the most of our issues concerns UI and related animations.

Our current workflow is (on a Facebook hidden object game) :

1. Artists produce PSD and animate prototypes in Flash
2. Artists re-organize their FLA files to be a bit more "programmer friendly"
3. Programmers retouches assets until they have the right structure and export classes inside a SWC, from Flash
4. Programmers try to improve performances, sometimes degrading the quality of game graphics

Our main idea is to hire somebody dedicated to prepare assets for programmers but I am really looking forward to improving the pipeline.

I was wondering if you guys have tips of any kind to improve this workflow, whether it be team organization, training, tools or tips with Flash. Any explanation on your asset pipeline is well appreciated too.