Fireworks Tip – Using Styles

By Leigh Howells on 3rd April 2012

I love Fireworks as a generic web design tool. No, it’s not as powerful as Photoshop for working with bitmaps, and it’s nowhere near as powerful as Illustrator for vector work. It sits somewhere in the middle with a mix of the most useful tools for all types of visual design work. But in addition, of course, it has a lot of functionality aimed specifically at web designers.

Whenever I try and show some of the nice little features Fireworks has to offer, other designers appear vaguely excited for a fleeting moment, but then go back to Photoshop regardless. In an attempt to show some of the nice tools that I think make Fireworks really powerful, I will record some very short screencasts to demonstrate (under 3 minutes if possible) as it’s a lot easier than trying to explain them in words.

Here’s the first one then; “Using Styles”; which are a bit like CSS for layer effects.
(Sorry about the size, but you’ll get the idea. I’ll do the proper zoomy-in thing next time :)

11 Comments

Len 4th April 2012 at 13:40 Permalink

Yes more of these please!

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Rachel Reveley 4th April 2012 at 13:56 Permalink

If only Adobe would put the typographic tools of Photoshop into Fireworks, I would go back to it in a flash, alas the type tools just don’t cut it, especially not now the web has discovered the joy of good type.

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- Leigh 4th April 2012 at 19:18 Permalink
  
  What specific typography tools do you miss? Must admit my use of typography is generally fairly limited in both Photoshop and Fireworks.
  
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  - Carlos Camacho 8th April 2012 at 0:11 Permalink
    
    I’m afraid @Rachel is thinking of an old version of Fireworks, the new version (CS5 as of this writing) has greatly improved the text tools and you can perform excellent stuff, including converting text to vectors, which may then be zoomed to any size wanted with no pixelation… just my 2 cents, for what it’s worth. Have been usign FW since the Macromedia days…
    
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    - Rachel Reveley 10th April 2012 at 8:39 Permalink
      
      I probably am, it was a few years ago so can’t remember exactly but I think it was features related to kerning and ligatures. Maybe I should have a play with it again. I have CS4 at home and never use Fireworks.
      
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Larmon 4th April 2012 at 17:48 Permalink

I learned something new today. Thanks so much!

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Bobby 4th April 2012 at 21:04 Permalink

Lovely. First time at the barn. Thanks for the tip. Looking forward to more titbits!

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Mark Taylor 5th April 2012 at 11:33 Permalink

Great tip, I use fireworks all the time and I’ve never even noticed the styles feature. I’ll make a point of trying this out on my next project.

Thanks for sharing, Leigh.

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Gareth 6th April 2012 at 7:57 Permalink

Keep these coming please! At last some focus on a great design tool. Thank you.

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Carlos Camacho 8th April 2012 at 0:15 Permalink

BTW, I learned a couple of interesting shortcuts for styles and the duplication feature, which I had never used before… what a time saver!!

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Andrew 12th April 2012 at 10:36 Permalink

Really enjoyed. I’ve not used fireworks before but Im looking to use it for rough mockups and perharps wireframing. This kind of video would be extremely useful.

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