Cooper Journal: How we use Fireworks

How we use Fireworks

by Nick Myers on July 1, 2008 | Comments (7)

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.

7 Comments

Marcelo Paiva

August 15, 2008

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

Alexey Kopylov

October 29, 2008

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)?

Nick Myers

October 30, 2008

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.

http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1498v1659

Alexey Kopylov

October 30, 2008

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!

Michel

May 16, 2011

Hey Nick,

Just remembered this great article on Adobe Devnet and re-read it! :)

Question: Do you still extensively use Fireworks in your daily workflow? (I use Fireworks CS5/5.1 and find it vastly improved in some areas.) I ask because I was wondering if you will be preparing more articles of this quality soon? :)

Thanks in advance!

Nick Myers

May 25, 2011

Hi Michel,

Thanks for the note. I don't have any plans to write another article at the moment. We've been using CS 5 at Cooper and still love it. We're in the process of trying to push Fireworks further but the bulk of this article still pertains to how we use Fireworks today. If there are topics you're interested in we could perhaps respond in a new article in the future.

Michel

June 13, 2011

Trying to push Fireworks further sounds as a great topic for an article! ;-)

Also, there's no need to write/prepare only "big articles" -- I think that short insights on particular design workflow (or only part of a workflow), with Fireworks involved, would be equally interesting to your readers (and the design community)!

Thanks for your reply, hope to remain in touch with you!

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