Fireworks is often overlooked. Many (most) web designers today use Photoshop to design their websites, and a lot of them have never considered or (*gasp) even heard of Fireworks. Adobe Fireworks is made for creating websites. That is what it was built for, and it does it well. Fireworks enables you to rapidly prototype and design for the web. With it you can create a clickable PDF that will act as a prototype. Also, you can quickly create export and optimize slices (Fireworks is better at optimizing images than Photoshop).
Now don’t get me wrong, Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and is amazing; it has way more features than Fireworks, but if all you are doing is designing websites, then you should use software that was specifically made for doing just that. Another excellent feature to note about Fireworks is that it is compatible with Photoshop. For the most part, you can open a psd in Fireworks, and it will recognize all of your layers and styles, and with CS4, compatability between Adobe’s programs have been further improved.
If you are a web designer and have not looked into using Fireworks, you should at least try it out and see for yourself how efficient it really is. There are hundreds of other excellent features Fireworks has to offer, read more about them at Adobe’s site.
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A great way to shortcut some ideas or at least get a design started, is by looking at some custom photoshop brushes. There are thousands, if not more of bushes out there customized in tons of ways. For instance, I found two amazing brush sets from Smashing Magazine that are freebies. Check them out:
These brushes also can be handy in that they can can be scaled as large as needed, and can be edited in illustrator and re exported as your own customized brush. Brushes can help add the fine details to your design that you may not have time to create from scratch. They are excellent tools that in my opinion should not be overlooked.
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).
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Ever have to do a simple task such as put a watermark on a picture? This can easily be done in Adobe Photoshop by inserting your image or text that you want to be your watermark over the original image and setting the transparency to whatever you wish. Now one image is simple and easy, but what if you have 500 images in separate folders at different sizes, resolutions and orientations? Now that can be time consuming. Recently I found an excellent way of speeding up this process.
First off, in Photoshop, you can record a certain set of actions, and save them to be repeated automatically later to a batch of files. What I did was record and save my actions for different pictures at different resolutions, so I had different presets for landscape and portrait orientations at different resolutions. Now that this is finished, how will I run these scripts on all of the pictures if they are in different folders and how will I be able run the scripts on specific images based on resolution and orientation? The answer is Bridge.
In Bridge, under the filters panel, there is an option to view the files in a folder and all of its subfolders, so by doing that you are able to view all of the images together without moving them. The filter panel also allows you to sort images by resolution, orientation and much more. So here is how this all comes together. Bridge allows you to perform a Photoshop batch to files you have selected in bridge. So, select the files you want to modify, and in Bridge so up to tools/photoshop/batch and select the action you recorded earlier. It’s that simple! Yes, I know it does take a bit of time to set up, but if you think you can put watermarks on 500 individual pictures manually then be my guest!
As Tim stated previously, incorporating a favicon with your site can reinforce branding for your business. At T&S, we wanted to take it a step further by adding an animated favicon. I created ours in Photoshop, saved it as a .gif, and renamed it as favicon.ico. Here is a website that will guide you in the process:
http://www.virtualmarketingblog.com/index.php/20070827/animated-favicon/
Here you can find a list of example sites with animated favicons:
http://myvogonpoetry.com/wp/2005/10/10/animated-favicons/
