One of the most popular tools for screen design and illustration in the last couple of years has undoubtedly been Sketch, which became an important part of many designers’ responsive web design and mobile design and prototyping workflows.
However, an increasing number of other tools are becoming available. In this article, I will explore the first browser-based app to be viable in the vector illustration and UI design space: Gravit.
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Transitions can be painful. It is in our nature to resist change, even when the possibility of doing something new and different may be exciting. Changing your workflow can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to start or understand how to embark on the change.
I’ve met with many designers (graphic, interaction, UI, etc.) who stick to old software because they are familiar and in their comfort zone, or because they are too scared to take the “leap of faith” and try something new (even when they know their old software does not allow them to work efficiently and effectively enough).
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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.
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A few weeks ago, I mentioned some of the best extensions that are currently available for Fireworks. Today, I’ll cover some of the best tutorials and articles, as well as many freebies (styles, templates, resource libraries, and so son) that are available for Fireworks. All of them can (and will!) teach you how to use Fireworks in a better, more optimal way.
Again, in order to help you obtain a good overview of everything covered in this article, I’ve grouped the resources into the following sections: tutorials, articles, assets and freebies, and finally, the conclusion.
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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.)
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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.
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Working with people can be hard. But get it right, and you’ll be able to produce stunning work more smartly and quickly than ever before. With methodologies such as agile and lean influencing how design teams work, some interesting challenges lie ahead. Iterative and collaborative practices vary greatly across work environments and even projects, and they can, and most likely will, bring your time-honed workflow to its knees.
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In the previous article in this series, I discussed our ideation and initial prototyping process. In this article, we’ll share how we used Adobe Fireworks in our iterative visual design process, along with other useful tips.
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I started with style guides like any other obsessive-compulsive designer: with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. Plus, knowing which component to use in a given situation is nice, too, right? Since making this a regular practice, I’ve found it’s been like having a nice combination of a CSS class and a pattern library all in one.
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