T&S Web Design

Sometimes the best way to improve your designs is to learn new techniques. I find that when I design a site, sometimes I inadvertently limit myself because I do not know the best way to do certain things. By following through a few tutorials, you can really expand your knowledge, thus enabling you to be a better designer. I have found that fireworks tutorials are not as easy to come by as others, so here is a good list to get you started:

Flisterz

Layers Magazine

Adobe Developer Connection

Abduzeedo

Sixthings

Fireworkszone

Qrayg

Voidix

Firetuts

Youtube

Senocular

Tutorialized

In taking a further look at Fireworks CS4 beta, I have come across some compatibility issues between the previous version and this one. Hopefully this issue will get sorted out as development continues with Fireworks CS4.

Recently I was designing a final version of a web site, all pages and content included. Upon reopening the design in CS3, I found that all of the text had strangely changed values. The kerning, spacing and point size of the text that changed by fractions of a value, and even the type itself was altered. Any word above about 8 characters got shortened. Furthermore, I had some lines of text that had two different colors in the same text box, and they were changed to the first color. Finally, I had used Arial font in the CS4 version of the final, and upon reopening the file, CS3 thought Arial (somehow replaced by Arial MT) need to be replaced, so I replaced it with Arial (considering that I did not have the choice and never had had the choice of selecting Arial MT). So in a nutshell I was forced to replace Arial with Arial, which may have caused the problems listed above.

So obviously CS4 is not yet compatible with previous versions of Fireworks, and CS4 really should only be used for testing until the actual release.

So I was looking around the other day on Adobe’s website and found that there was a beta release for Fireworks CS4!!! So I downloaded and installed it and am currently using it. What’s even cooler is that as long as you own Fireworks CS3, you can use the serial number from your old Fireworks to keep the beta until a month after the actual product come out. Pretty sweet, eh?

Anyways, I really like Fireworks CS4. Honestly, I think it’s far, far better than CS3. The first thing I noticed when loading CS4 for the first time is that its layout is much more like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash CS3. Instead of having all of your pallets open at once and crowding your screen, you can keep them into their own sections, and show them as needed.

You can even collapse them into single buttons, if you’re that good, or keep it the old way if you’d rather.

Also, Fireworks CS4 now allows the tabbing of different documents, so if you’re working on multiple documents they can be tabbed into one window, instead of have like 5 bajillion windows open at the same time… IE6 anyone??

Both of these features are excellent organizational tools, that will give you more room to design without the clutter of open panels.

There seems to be more options throughout CS4 as well. For instance you can space objects evenly by a certain percentage or pixel amount. There are a ton more path editing tools available, so that will make working with vector objects much easier.

Fireworks CS4 also has a ton more styles! Styles are organized into different categories on a dropdown menu, and there or tons of them! My favorite is the diagonal styles, which will make my job a lot easier if I want to make diagonals quickly.

I’m sure there is a ton more new features the CS4 has that I have yet to discover as well.

I have been using the beta for about a week and am convinced that the final of Fireworks CS4 will be superior to CS3.  I have found a few bugs here and there that I’m sure they will iron out (after all, it is a beta). Sometimes selecting things can be a pain, for some reason it takes two or three clicks to select objects most of the time.

The more I use Fireworks, the more powerful I realize it is, and with this update Fireworks will become an even greater tool for designing sweet websites.

So as an aspiring designer in the digital world, I am always looking for ways to increase my knowledge about the programs I use to design, mainly Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Personally, I got my footing through school, and then started reading books and looking at tutorials online. All of these have helped me gain knowledge, but recently I found out another excellent source for learning about these programs. Podcasts!!

The other night I was looking through the free podcast directory for some videos for my ipod, when I stumbled upon all sorts of podcasts that had video tutorials for pretty much anything I would ever need! There are hundreds of these video podcasts that have tips and tricks from professionals and they are all free! So if you are ever in need of some Photoshop knowledge in advanced layering on 3D objects or just need to know how to touch up an image, check out the free podcasts!!! Here is a link to get you started with Photoshop, it will open up itunes and send you to the podcast directory (you don’t have to have an itunes account to get podcasts).