CategoryExtensions

December 10, 2014 — 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 and ever changing. Web designers need to be familiar with HTML and CSS code and front-end technologies when they conceive a website or application’s interface. It might be of no real interest to some of you, but it could add some precious assets to your range of skills. Read more…

July 18, 2014 — Fireworks is an excellent UI design tool; however, Adobe decided to feature-freeze it back in 2013 and (at the same time) did not offer any replacement tool to its users. Nevertheless, since Fireworks runs fine today on the latest Mac OS X and Windows OS, and since it still offers a solid UI-design feature set, many designers continue to use it and rely on it daily. For those of you who are searching for a similar tool, Sketch 3.0 seems to be a pretty good alternative to Fireworks, but it’s still not quite there yet; it’s Mac-only, and while its vector tools are very good and it now has artboards, pages, symbols and styles, it lacks a few of the basic features available in Fireworks. (I’ll talk more about possible alternatives to Fireworks in Part 2 of this series.) Read more…

June 4, 2014 — 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 could write a command to automate the process and save yourself a lot of time. Alternatively, if you are missing a particular feature that would improve your workflow, you could write a more complex extension — a command panel — to implement it. Read more…

November 6, 2013 — 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. Read more…

September 20, 2013 — 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. Read more…

May 2, 2013 — With a solid foundation, the house is stable, and building on it is easy. With a solid grid, your design can easily be adapted to accommodate whatever changes come along. Today, we’ll share iOS Grid System, which I’ve been using when designing apps in Adobe Fireworks. Read more…

April 4, 2013 — 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. Read more…

November 14, 2012 — 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. In this article, we’ll look at the Texture Panel. Read more…

August 28, 2012 — 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. Read more…

May 25, 2012 — 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. Read more…