Journal



Recent Entries

The Birds Nest & the television experience
Amazement operated on many levels during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. During each performance, my mind struggled to process what I was seeing. What is this? How in the world did they pull this off? Where does an idea like this even come from? TV: These small... (Continue)
Slanty (and underhanded) Design
I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think... (Continue)
Countdown to a spanking
XP: Are you SURE you don't want to restart now? A constant thorn in my side from our use of Windows XP as our primary workstations is the Automatic Updates feature. In explaining my frustration to others, I've inevitably compared it to very similar behavior in Mac OS X,... (Continue)

How we use Fireworks

by Nick Myers on July 1, 2008

In our training courses, we're frequently asked what tools we use. The answer is pretty simple. While we might use Photoshop for heavy photo manipulation or break out Illustrator for the odd diagram or visualization, we've come to love Adobe Fireworks for designing screen-based interfaces and illustrating scenarios.

Recently, Adobe asked us to share some of our Fireworks techniques with the user community. As a result, we worked with them to create this short video about how our interaction designers and visual designers worked together on a recent project for GoldMail.

If you want to get more in depth with Fireworks, you can read a more thorough article about specific techniques that I recently wrote on Adobe's developer center.

Filed under: Interaction design, Techniques, Visual design


Nick Myers is a Principal Visual Designer at Cooper, where he designs experiences for companies across a variety of digital products. His designs have received several awards since he began working as a designer in 1996. He teaches, studies, and writes about visual design and enjoys helping companies craft stunning interfaces and digital brands whether in retail, financial management, patient care, or photo sharing. When Nick's not designing, he's usually training for his next marathon.
More entries by nick


Comments

On Aug 15, 2008, Marcelo Paiva said:

Nick, I really like the way you and Tim work together. I have also read your article on "Designing interactive products with Fireworks", outstanding!

I have been using Fireworks in the same way for years - I really thought I was the only dork using FW frames and pages.

I am now trying to use FW to improve XAML productivity and I think there might be an opportunity to work with you and Tim.

Please send me an email,
Regards,

Marcelo Paiva

 

Post a comment


Name

Email Address

Comments (Feel free to use basic HTML tags for style)

We're trying to advance the conversation, and we trust that you will, too. We'd rather not moderate, but we will remove any comments that are blatantly inflammatory or inappropriate. Let it fly, but keep it clean. Thanks.

To help filter spam, please enter the letter h here