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Buzzkill
Alternate dimensions
An Insurgency of Quality
How we use Fireworks
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 the director of visual design & branding 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.
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Comments
I'm newcomer in the Adobe Fireworks prototyping and have one question.
In this product we have the powerfull pages, layers and states
(formerly frames) model -- I can prepare an interactive prototype in
various formats - html, pdf, Air, Flex and I can put hotspotes on
prototype objects and link this ones with pages.
Here is my questions -- can I link my hotspotes with states instead of
pages? I think the states without linking ability is the set of slides
only. It's naturally to treate fireworks' pages as UI screens and
states as states of this screens and to have possibility of linking
states with each other. Is there any way to link states (I have not
found such possibility yet)?
Hi Alexey,
From what I understand, you can't do this currently in Fireworks. The Adobe team may consider it as a future feature though. You can see this video for a potential work around.
Nick, thank you for the answer.
I think Adobe team guys should implement this feature -- they said "A" when renamed Frames to States but didn't say "B" with linking possibiity :)
This feature is totally obvious and killing!
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