Are you on Team Photoshop or Team Fireworks? I’d assume 99% of web designers would be on the Photoshop team, but the goal behind today’s post is to outline some of the advantages behind Fireworks, which was built with the web in mind. By no means am I saying all sites should be designed in Fireworks or that Fireworks has all the answers, but there are some points I think should be taken into consideration.
Image Optimisation
This is probably one of the best known advantages of Fireworks and maybe one of the biggest reasons Adobe have kept Fireworks around after merging with Macromedia. I learnt this little bit of knowledge after attending an Adobe conference in March this year.
Basically, Fireworks uses a different compression technology than Photoshop that allows better compression for both JPEG and GIF. For a few days after the Adobe conference, I did remember why they are different, but at this point, it is something that has slipped my mind. If any one knows why they are different please add a comment.
Example:
Photoshop 10.7kb |
Fireworks 8.5kb |
Vector Based Shapes
This would have to be one of my biggest loves with Fireworks – the ability to create / edit / colour / style shapes through Fireworks. All shapes created using Fireworks are vector based and allow for the consistent re-size, reshape, addition on corners and addition of styles (including: gradients, patterns and other filters).
You may be saying, yes but Photoshop can do this too. But it’s not that Fireworks can do it and Photoshop can’t, it’s how it does it. No need to add a filter to apply a gradient or colour fill, no need to re-create the shape or edit the control points to transform a shape with rounded corners. It’s pretty much all within a few clicks and can be changed at any time. This in my opinion is one of the biggest time saving functions in Fireworks!
Fireworks Pages
I have only recently started using pages, instead of large groups, or multiple files, but the basic idea behind Fireworks Pages, is there is a different page for each (yes you guessed it…) page of the site. Brilliant, how did they ever come up with that?! OK, maybe I’m getting a bit too excited over it, but it is so simple in it’s idea I’m surprised Photoshop hasn’t taken the idea and turned it into their own (but then I guess Photoshop wasn’t originally designed to create websites, and that is what Fireworks’ purpose is).
Ctrl + Alt + F
This is probably in Photoshop, I just don’t know the command (comment if you do) but this simply shrinks the canvas to the size of all your layers. Comes in really handy when getting ready to output files to the web.
That’s about it for my first round of Advantages, some of the other advantages that I will try and expand on in my next post are:
- Better Integration with Flash
- Gradient Fill Effect
- Ease of Use
This is by no means a bashing of Photoshop or a “Fireworks does everything Photoshop does” post, it is just a few advantages that I have come across during my use of Fireworks in my day to day designing of websites (not that I design on every day 
).
About Joel
