Fireworks Article

Wow am I impressed. As a long time Photoshop/ImageReady user, I do all of my web graphics in Photoshop. Sure, I have Fireworks, it came with the Macromedia bundle I have, but I didn't give it a serious nod until now. The Adobe website has a great 3 part series on “Taking a Fireworks comp to a CSS-based layout in Dreamweaver”. It's an excellent tutorial because it takes you from start to finish.

What I'm really impressed with though is the nice little features in Fireworks, like textures, effects, filters and stroke options. It's really fantastic what's possible with this little program. I'll have to dig more into it. Some of the interface is clunky and unintuitive. For example, the tutorial assumes you know how to create a gradient and manipulate it. Making the gradient was easier, but the gradient tool is buried in the Colors section of the toolbox.

Slicing was a really pleasant experience in Fireworks also. There are several options for working with slices available from context-sensitive menus. There's an option to export a single slice from Fireworks.

Sheri German does a great job though in presenting 'The Process' of actually taking a prototype from an image editing program and converting that into usable chunks for CSS development. What's really painful though, is chugging through all of the menus in Dreamweaver to create the style sheet. It's so much easier to just type styles into a style sheet than selecting menu options.