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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Using states to create a scenario
  3. Transitioning to the visual designer
  4. Pixel precision with vectors and the Path palette
  5. Documenting the form and behavior
  6. Graphic production, and advantages/ disadvantages of Fireworks

Designing interactive products with Fireworks

Graphic production

Fireworks is best known for its effectiveness at graphic production. We mostly export full screens for documentation, but we are frequently asked for production-ready graphics. If you've been meticulous and disciplined about symbolizing graphics in your files, then it's easy to export everything from the Document Library. This is particularly helpful for icons, where slicing of graphics is often unnecessary. Simply go to the Document Library palette options menu and select Export Symbols (see Figure 20).

Quickly exporting symbols via the options menu in the Document Library palette

Figure 20. Quickly exporting symbols via the options menu in the Document Library palette

Batch processing is also helpful when you have a massive collection of graphics in original format that need to be optimized for a specific medium, such as Java Swing or the web.

Advantages and disadvantages of Fireworks

Just because we spend most of our time working in Adobe Fireworks doesn't mean we've stopped using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Fireworks is fundamentally an application dedicated to screen design, so Photoshop and Illustrator are more appropriate in cases where I'm designing for print. Photoshop also can't be beat for photographic "clean up" with the rubber stamp tool. I find that most photo manipulation, such as levels, curves, and masking, is easily managed in Fireworks and is easier to undo with the help of filters.

Fireworks' other historical great weakness had been its poor type engine, but the new version now uses the Adobe type engine, which has all but removed any shortcomings in the application.

Where to go from here

Over the years we have assessed and re-assessed competing products at Cooper to ensure that we are using the best tools available. For interactive and visual interface design, Fireworks minimizes the production work and allows us to focus on designing great products for our customers.

Refer to the following resources to learn more about the Cooper process, using the Guides panel in Fireworks to align multiple objects to achieve a pixel-perfect layout, and using rich symbols to quickly create and edit elements in your Fireworks documents:

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