It was great meeting everyone, putting faces to twitter avatars and meeting new people hopefully for the next Refresh it has a bigger turn out.

Details about tonight’s meeting here.

Another great tune to listen to while working!

Why I’m Designing with Adobe Fireworks

I have used Photoshop for years now and I’m pretty good with it but lately I’ve noticed a few quirks with Photoshop when using it to design websites.  My biggest peeve with Photoshop is the folders I always did prefer Fireworks folders/page method of organising layers, It’s just so much better. My last problem with Photoshop for designing websites is using too many bitmap graphics resulting in shapes and elements not being scalable to a certain degree.

The Transition

The change won’t easy, however after spending so long working with Photoshop and learning about its quirks and growing pains I’m really nervous about  using it so I’m not going to rush it I’m going to work with it when I have some “downtime” and then once the speed of using Fireworks and Photoshop is the same I’ll drop Photoshop for Fireworks full-time.

What I Love about Fireworks

OK it has been a few months and I’m glad to say I can now use Fireworks for creating websites it’s really powerful here is a few of the features I love about it: -

Pages

Pages are probably the best feature ever! It allows you to vastly decrease time spent mucking around with folders and allows you to build a prototype of a website quickly and give you an idea of the finished site (and sitemap) which is great. The fact it allows you to organise your file by “pages” and allow you to create master pages the layer organisation of a PNG will be better than that of a PSD. No longer will you have to fight with a thousand Photoshop layers!

Text layers that auto delete

A  super simple feature in Fireworks when your using the type tool and you type some text that you didn’t mean to simply delete the text, click off and BOOM text layer is gone! However you do it in Photoshop and you’re left with a text layer that you need to delete manually, there you go some time saved right there!

Vector shapes

The vector tools in Fireworks are a lot better and manipulated vector shapes a lot better than Photoshop. The vector tools really act a lot like Freehands (if you can remember Freehand!) vector tools which is pretty sweet. Drawing rounded rectangles and being able to edit their corners and  “roundness” and being able to scale them, yes please!

Bonus feature related vector shapes are being able to hover over the area click on a shape and boom fireworks takes you either to the layer if you have the folder open or if its closed it takes you to that layers folder with Photoshop it only takes you to the layers folder.

What have I gained from using Fireworks

I think what I’ve gained is being able to produce websites that look good in both in Photoshop and Fireworks. Being able to switch between two different programs and produce the same quality of work is probably the biggest thing I’ve gained from using Photoshop and Fireworks.

I’m never going to stop using one for the other but If I ever work in an agency that only uses Fireworks then I’m ready to use it and it’s not something that I’m going to have to learn from scratch. Being able to produce the same quality of site in either program is a big advantage to have over other designers.

This post was originally written on the 1st of January since then I’ve been using both Fireworks and Photoshop. I’ve learnt a lot from this experience and I urge you to try to learn both Photoshop and Fireworks!

I’ll write a post with a log of all the features added.

Cheers,

Bryan.

Great piece of music to listen to whilst designing!