Today, being a designer is about much more than drawing beautiful interfaces in Photoshop or Fireworks. To properly design a website or application, a UI designer must understand the technology with which their products will be built; therefore, they must have a minimum set of front-end development skills. The World Wide Web is not static. Quite the opposite: It’s responsive, fluid, evolving... Read More
One of the most powerful features of Adobe Fireworks is that you can extend its functionality. Almost anything you can do through Fireworks’ interface — and even some things that you can’t — can also be achieved by writing a simple JavaScript extension.
Fireworks extensions are of two main types: commands and command panels. If you find yourself repeatedly performing a tedious task, you... Read More
This article is the third part of an article series about improving your design workflow in Adobe Fireworks with some of the best extensions currently available. You may want to check out the first and second parts if you're not already familiar with them. – Ed.
We have already covered over a dozen brilliant extensions to add to your Fireworks arsenal, just the tip of the iceberg. With... Read More
In my previous article on Smashing Magazine, I discussed seven excellent extensions that could fundamentally change your Web design workflow in Adobe Fireworks. The extensions expand Fireworks’ capabilities by adding valuable functionality that could make a huge impact on your overall productivity as a designer.
I have to admit, though, that at the time, I was able only to scratch the... Read More
I’ll come right out and say it. I think the grid is the unsung hero of a good design. It gives structure and lets the design fall perfectly into place on the canvas. With a grid, adapting and building something new into your design is easy. Think of it like a house’s foundation.
With a solid foundation, the house is stable, and building on it is easy. With a solid grid, your design can... Read More
With its structured approach to organizing assets, Adobe Fireworks can be a pleasure for designing and prototyping. But demonstrating your designs on a wide range of devices can be time-consuming and could even require some degree of coding.
The Create Demo extension addresses some of these issues. It automatically converts your Fireworks documents into portable presentations, which can... Read More
When you’re working in Fireworks — be it for a website design, mobile design or graphic asset for a project — one need you will undoubtedly have is support for textures. While Fireworks is an amazing tool in other areas, the usability of the textures feature could definitely be improved. In this article, we’ll look at an extension that does just that — the Texture panel.
Currently in... Read More
As a platform, Fireworks gives its users a lot of freedom, when it comes to extending it. Because of that, Fireworks has a thriving ecosystem of add-ons (extensions) that add a lot of valuable functionality with newer options.
In this article, I'll try to list some of my top extensions for Fireworks. These are not necessarily the most complex or powerful extensions, but rather those... Read More
There is an aspect to Web design that no one likes to talk about: spec’ing. We all do it, we all hate it, but we also understand that specs are vital to both designers and developers.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term in this context, “specs” is short for specifications—in the case of design, they are instructions that specify colors, fonts, sizes, spacing and so on, just like... Read More
