Adobe Fireworks has emerged as an industry leading tool for prototyping and creating unique website designs because of its several exceptional features and the ease of use that it offers. This tool is comparatively easier than using Photoshop and offers a huge range of design possibilities that many may not be aware of. People who are more accustomed to using Photoshop in each phase of website creation will find this tutorial really very helpful. The resources gathered here will help you understand the power and advantages of using this application.
Fireworks is loved by the designers for its amazing rapid prototyping abilities, which help visualize and create web pages at extremely fast paces. The application uses the native PNG format so that the layered file sizes are not too heavy and this is the reason why your creatively built web pages would load faster. Moreover, it will allow you to export codes very fast and which will enable you to seek your client’s feedback at each phase of the designing process. With its amazingly fast exporting ability and the image optimization features, it can help you to win your client’s appreciation with your exceptional designing abilities.
In fact, Adobe Fireworks has become a favorable tool for most of the web designers who work today on large corporate websites. The tool is also getting very popular among information architects and there are several reasons behind it.
Some of the key benefits of Fireworks are:
- No need to switch between applications to carry out different types of tasks, as it has a comprehensive tool set covering a wider range of designing needs. For example, the integration of both bitmap and vector tools in a single environment allows designers to carry out their tasks without switching applications.
- Selection of objects and resizing and changing their locations right away. One can hardly enjoy such level of flexibility with Photoshop.
- Using efficient optimization features, the size of Web-ready images can be reduced while working on high-quality output
- Availability of extensive libraries and templates for selecting a variety of Web-elements
- Export of Fireworks-mockups to other Macromedia applications such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash.
So, we are bringing here an assortment of excellent Adobe Fireworks tutorials that will greatly help the design community for creating exceptional quality fireworks effects.
1. Logo Extraction
This tutorial will guide the designers in extracting a logo from a raster image. Using Adobe Fireworks Live Filters, you can not only extract a logo prototype but can recolor it in your chosen colors, gradients and textures. You can perform all this very quickly in a way you wish to.
2. Circular Shadows & Highlights
Using Adobe Fireworks, you can create amazing lighting effects for circular shapes. You can create unlimited number of shadows and highlights to help beautify your circular shapes. This tutorial will show you to use effectively gradients and masks for adding shadows to a circular graphic.
3. Using Fireworks 101
This tutorial can be very helpful for all those who want to sharpen their Fireworks skills. While covering some basic functionality of the application, the tutorial will try to explain the techniques of combining, subtracting and other types of interplays with the paths. These skills will greatly help you in creating logos.
4. Typography Art
Here, you can break the monotony of placing your text in vertical and horizontal views only. The tutorial will guide you in placing your text freely and create some unique typography art, where you can place your text in different forms and shapes using pen tools.
5. Creating Fading Light Vectors
In this tutorial, a designer will learn to create fading light linear vectors and thus giving some cool effects to an image. It will show how simple it is to achieve and then converting a vector into bitmaps. Using Fireworks CS3, creating effects of fading lights will be explained.
6. Sticky Notes
This Fireworks tutorial will explain you the technique of creating bright-colored sticky notes digitally. These remarkable little pieces of paper with adhesive strips on their back will be important for your project completion and can be used as a tool to keep in mind all important milestones to be achieved in a phased manner.
7. CSS and Image Export in Fireworks CS4
In Fireworks, you can visualize a website design and thereafter can immediately export the HTML, CSS code, and other required files, so that all files will be readily available to upload on the web server. This tutorial will guide how CSS and Images can be exported in Fireworks CS4.
8. Achieving pixel-perfect accuracy
The objects that you place on your Fireworks canvas will appear exactly in the same way in your export. The tutorial shows how can you control an object’s appearance and can achieve the same number of pixels that you intend to attain. You will also learn about maintaining the exact axis coordination.
9. Creating fully functional websites
Fireworks enables you to work with a powerful web layer, which you can use for a wide variety of creative renderings. The tutorial will explain you all and guide you how can you create and organize pages and different sub-pages from within the program itself.
10. Extremely easy to use
Fireworks is simple to use and easy to learn among all Adobe products. This Adobe Fireworks tutorial attempts at simplifying the application and helping the learner to discover its immense capabilities that can be finally used to start creating useful and innovative design works.
11. Fireworks for Illustration
This tutorial shows how Fireworks can be an exceptionally good illustration tool and help you to improve your drawing skills. One will be able to learn how using Fireworks as a primary drawing tool, one can create beautiful illustrations in an effortless manner.
12. Creating an icon in Fireworks
In this tutorial, you can learn to create simple yet visually pleasing icons. One can learn some basic techniques in Fireworks, like use of elliptical marquee tool, making a circular selection and use of a radial gradient to make icons etc.
13. Creating Old Paper Effect
Many designers may not know that in Fireworks, one can easily create different types of old paper effects. This tutorial will explain you about the Live Filter techniques that you can utilize while converting a bitmap to transparency. This technique will allow you to make an image to appear like an old paper.
14. Changing Image Color in Fireworks
In this tutorial, you will learn about this effective technique of changing the color of an image. You can change the color of the entire image or only a particular area of the image. In this way, you can give a completely different look to an existing image.
15. Cool Photo Frame Effects in Fireworks
You can give different cool and classy photo frame effects to your images in Fireworks. This Adobe Fireworks tutorial will show you how to choose various settings for selecting different types of edges for your images. You can try out these classy effects to offer a cool look to your photos.
16. Twist Effect in Fireworks
In Fireworks, you can turn simple images more interesting by giving them swirling, dazzling and fading effects. This tutorial will show you how to use the Command option to use the properties of stepping, spacing, rotation and opacity to bring desired changes in your graphics.
17. Feather Effect in Fireworks
This tutorial will demonstrate you about using Fireworks as a great image editing tool. The application allows you to edit images easily and get some really cool images by using some of the remarkable Fireworks properties, such as feather effects to get softer and smoother images.
18. Fading Effects in Fireworks
This tutorial focuses on the skillful use of the Command option which will enable you to fade an image in several different manners. For example, you can fade an image horizontally, vertically, diagonally and elliptically. However for this, you need to have Fireworks MX 2004or its higher versions installed in your computer.
19. Patterned Text in Fireworks
For many designers, achieving beautiful pattern texts is a popular way to beautify their graphics. For all those designers, this tutorial can be really very useful explaining to give different types of patterns such as illusion, metallic, flame etc to a text.
20. Textured Text in Fireworks
This common effect is also very popular among the designers. In this tutorial, you will learn how to give a texture effect to your text. This is however very much similar to the patterned text and one can learn both the effects simultaneously.
21. Image effects
This tutorial can be very useful for a professional web designer where he or she can learn to create a variety of graphics such as logos, website layouts, and icons etc using different types of image effects. Macromedia Fireworks can be used to design animated GIFs, swap images and a variety of cool stuff.
22. Swap Images in Fireworks
In this tutorial, you can learn to create swap images using Fireworks. Designing swap images are simple and can make your design look more attractive. The tutorial will teach you about using swap images in your websites with its step by step instructions.
23. Drop Down Menus in Fireworks
This tutorial will teach you to create vertical and horizontal drop-down menus, which are very important for creating navigation features of a website. Using Adobe Fireworks CS4, one can easily create several types of drop down menus in Fireworks.
24. Animated Gifs in Fireworks
Using animated GIFs, you can make a website look more dynamic and interactive. This tutorial will demonstrate you how easy it could be to create graphic animations and to add to your websites. This tutorial intends to teach you this exciting feature of Fireworks.
25. Fireworks Paste Inside
This tutorial shows how you can paste an image and create several versions of the same picture. Using the Paste Inside command in Fireworks MX 2004, you can simply paste pictures inside different shapes such as stars, circles, arrows etc.
26. Border Styles in Fireworks
In this tutorial, you will learn to create different border styles for your web pages or images. The Fireworks MX 2004 has a wide range of stroke categories, which you can use to beautify the image borders. You can also change the stroke attributes using different tools such as Pen, Pencil or Brush.
27. Typography Art in Fireworks
This tutorial will help you to learn the techniques related to the creation of simple typography arts in Adobe Fireworks. Using the transformation tool, one can easily create beautiful typography effects. The paste inside property of the application helps to create beautiful typography illustrations.
28. Collage of Images in Fireworks
This tutorial will explain you the skill of creating an attractive header collage of four different images. Using Fireworks CS4, it can be created in a few simple steps. One image will be taken as the background while other three will be the foreground images.
29. Digital Collage Mixing Buildings and Vector Shapes
This tutorial will explain you how to create various illustrative and stunning vector elements using both Fireworks CS3 and Illustrator CS3 simultaneously. You will learn to add light effects and architectural elements to your final vector composition and thus you can improve your workflow.
30. Clouds in Fireworks
In this Adobe Fireworks tutorial, you will learn to create clouds very quickly. Using Adobe Fireworks, creating clouds from scratch is very simple and which can fit into different nature themes and artworks. You can create flat clouds, fluffy clouds and other types of clouds.
31. Advanced Stroke Options
This Adobe Fireworks tutorial demonstrates how to use the advanced stroke panel in Fireworks to create and edit custom strokes. This feature in Fireworks allows you to achieve several types of unique effects such as stars, clouds, etc, which require random objects.
Conclusion
It can be seen from the above tutorials that Adobe Fireworks has all the features that any designer would love to use to present his or her creative expressions before the world. Many designers who used to rely on Photoshop are now turning to Fireworks today to achieve beautiful designing results with a remarkable speed.
A number of web designers, graphic designers, illustrators and visualizers have already started using the powerful capabilities of Adobe Fireworks. This great graphic design application can be used to produce beautiful vector designs, various layouts, logos and icons. With its immense designing possibilities, this application can simply be used to create cool illustrations that can stun every onlooker.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Fireworks is that it allows you to import multi-layered files from other applications such as Flash and Photoshop and this ease-of-use togetherness with different applications helps Fireworks to achieve all-round results with a greater degree of flexibility. It’s faster and easier and this is the reason why it’s supposed to be the future of the designing in the coming times.
Author Bio – Debarshi Ghosh Dastidar
Debarshi is a part time blogger and a self taught web designer. He loves to create content. He is currently associated with Iflexion – a mobile application development company.
