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Unleash Your Full Design Potential -- An Introduction to Macromedia Fireworks

© 2001 by David Morris. All Rights Reserved.

Web designers have every right to expect a workday that runs smoothly and a Web graphics program that enables them to quickly create amazing Web sites. Fireworks 4 aims to enable Web designers to accomplish more in less time, create interactive Web pages with drag-and-drop simplicity, and streamline their entire collaboration process. With Fireworks 4 - the Web tool built specifically for Web designers - you can stay focused on your creative efforts and produce high quality, clean designs that look great online and in your portfolio.

Web designers should not have to put up with the complicated jumble of features and dialog boxes found in all-purpose software like Photoshop 6. Rather, you should embrace the seamless user interface, tight integration with most any HTML editor, and powerful features -including pop-up menus, drag and drop rollovers, and live animations - found in Fireworks 4.

Fireworks 4 - specifically built for Web designers from the ground up - is all about helping people create cool Web graphics that amaze users and impress employers. The user-interface was created by Web designers for Web designers, so all the key design features are easily accessible - unlike Photoshop 6 which makes you hunt them down in modal dialog boxes or access them from ImageReady. We figure, Web designing is demanding enough - why make it tougher? That is why Fireworks 4 empowers users to design and optimize graphics, create animations, and produce interactivity in a single integrated environment that fully supports the creative process - and doesn't disrupt it like Photoshop 6.

And a Good Time Is Had By All

Who wouldn't love to discard the drudgery associated with work and party with the core creative skills that make the profession fun? Fireworks 4 makes that possible by tightly wrapping all the BANG Web designers need to meet tight deadlines and increased workloads in a User Interface that is immediately accessible and that easily integrates with Macromedia Web Publishing products. For example, Dreamweaver and Fireworks 4, working together, enable Web designers to use a tracing image graphic as a guide for final HTML designs. This enables you to finalize your Web page more quickly.

Fireworks 4 makes the authoring process simple by using an user interface that is instantly recognizable to experienced Macromedia users and completely intuitive to new users. With Custom Keyboard shortcuts, Launcher Bar, Tools Panel Layout, Menu Structure, and Color Selection that are straightforward, familiar, and easy to use, you'll feel like you're hanging out with old friends. In fact, you can choose from predefined sets from Fireworks 4, Photoshop, and Illustrator or create your own set of custom short cuts.

Create Interactivity Like an Expert: Pop-Ups, Rollovers, and Live Animation

Pop-up menus are extremely popular ways to provide users with organized, logical navigation of your site.

The Fireworks 4 Pop-Up Menu Creator empowers designers and programmers - who may not have the time or the JavaScript knowledge to create them - with a step-by-step, visual environment that enables you to define the contents and appearance of your pop-up menu without writing a single line of code. Soon, your feet will be up because it's incredibly easy to export the necessary JavaScript that makes a menu work in a browser.

And if you think that's cool, how about creating disjoint rollovers with drag-and-drop simplicity? With Fireworks 4, nothing is complicated and everything is easy. Web designers can create a mouse-over action that swaps one image for another by selecting a button in the workspace. Then, you simply drag the target icon to where you want the image swap to take place. In the dialog, you simply choose a source layer from the pop-up menu and click OK. That's it. You're done. If you want, you can even see the relationship between the slices by selecting a button and you can move the slices to different parts of your page without losing the rollover behavior.

Fireworks 4 also enables Web designers to use onscreen controls to create and edit simple animations that move, scale, rotate, or fade an object over several frames. All you have to do is select the object you want to animate and decide which animation properties you want to apply. Again, it's that simple. You can also change the animation type by dragging the animation controls in the workspace or by changing settings in the object inspector.

Taken together, these three features are essential to Web designers who want to liven up your pages, but don't have the time or the experience necessary. And this is just a small sampling of the remarkable tools that make Fireworks 4 a robust ally for Web designers who crave sophistication and ease-of-use.

Finally, Free to Choose How Your Work Flows

Creative professionals should be able to work as they choose and their software should not impose limits. Unlike Photoshop 6, Fireworks 4 doesn't force Web designers into a predefined workflow. With Fireworks 4 you can use whatever HTML editor you want. Web designers can use Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Microsoft FrontPage, or any generic HTML editor. For instance, you can output JavaScript rollovers to a GoLive template and the rollovers will open in GoLive as native GoLive buttons and actions. Also, you can easily insert HTML and JavaScript into an existing HTML file in Dreamweaver, GoLive, FrontPage, and other HTML editors using the Fireworks Copy to Clipboard Wizard.

In fact, as part of a vision that seeks to empower creative professionals to fully collaborate with their peers, Fireworks integrates seamlessly with Photoshop file import and export functions. Web designers can import Photoshop 6 and 5 files, complete with editable layers and masks. Layer styles will automatically convert to Fireworks 4 live effects. Web designers can also export files to Photoshop 6 - retaining all the texts, layers, masks, and live effects. This creates an easy, flexible workflow that enables teams of Photoshop and Fireworks designers to work together.

To learn more about Fireworks 4 and the rest of the Macromedia product family, visit us at www.macromedia.com.

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