In this article, Ani Kostova will explore the first browser-based app to be viable in the vector illustration and UI design space: Gravit. Why Gravit? Mainly because Sketch and Affinity Designer are not options for Ani. She decided to give it a try and test it seriously. After a few months of using it, she feels ready to review its features and offer some practical tips and tricks she’s learned along the way.
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Changing your workflow can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to start or understand how to embark on the change. Fabio Benedetti has met with many designers (graphic, interaction, UI, etc.) who stick to old software because they are familiar and in their comfort zone, or because they are too scared to take the “leap of faith” and try something new, but change, as scary as it may be, most of the time is a good thing — first, because you learn how to do new things and, secondly, because feeling challenged and getting out of our comfort zone every once in a while is beneficial.
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The World Wide Web is not static. Quite the opposite: It’s responsive, fluid, evolving and ever changing.
Web designers need to be familiar with HTML and CSS code and front-end technologies when they conceive a website or application’s interface. In Creative Suite version 6, a CSS Properties panel was added to its toolset — a tool that, if used properly, could help both designers with CSS coding experience and beginners alike. By the end of this article, you should have a better overview of this feature and also know how to use it with CSS Professionalzr, a free extension developed by Matt Stow to further optimize the code generated by the panel.
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Icon design is a very specific skill that overlaps illustration, screen design and, of course, visual design. An icon designer needs to understand lighting, proportions and, most importantly, the context of the icon itself. Is the icon you are designing going to be used on the web? Perhaps in a mobile app? Somewhere else? These are the questions that icon designers must asks themselves before starting work on a project. The answer will affect the icon’s details, reflections, shadows, background and many other features.
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Since Adobe decided to feature-freeze Fireworks in 2013, there is no replacement available for this Software. However, there are many extensions that might help you improve Fireworks. In the second part of this article, Michael Bozgounov will show you more extensions (commands, command panels, and auto shapes) and you’ll learn how to take full advantage of them. Let’s get started!
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Since Adobe decided to feature-freeze Fireworks in 2013, there is no replacement available for this Software, and, as every designer out there knows, Fireworks works best with extensions! However, there are many extensions that might help you improve Fireworks. In this article, Michel Bozgounov will show you some of the most useful Fireworks extensions that will help you work faster and be more effective with Fireworks; he has tested many of them himself, to be sure that they work flawlessly.
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Almost anything you can do through Fireworks’ interface can also be achieved by writing a simple JavaScript extension. Dmitriy Fabrikant learned to develop Fireworks extensions by writing the Specctr plugin. While working on Specctr, he had witnessed Fireworks’ passionate community actively support the app (Sadly, Fireworks CS6 is the last major release from Adobe). Now that we can’t expect Adobe to add any more features to Fireworks, the ability to extend the app becomes even more important, because many designers still rely on it, and through extensions, new features and panels can be added. This article is aimed at those interested in developing extensions for Fireworks.
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You’ll be able to produce stunning work more smartly and quickly than ever before if you work with people. By sharing assets, constructing files systematically and generating objects using core techniques, the team is freed to focus on crafting concepts and solving problems. In this article, Dan Nisbet will show you how to create a stronger foundation for collaboration, even before the design process begins. He’ll also explore some techniques that are unique to Adobe Fireworks and that have the potential to transform your collaboration.
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In this article, Olawale Oladunni will share how he used Adobe Fireworks in his iterative visual design process, along with other useful tips. As he explored all of the alternative ways to make one’s workflow efficient, he realized that Fireworks is still powerful and will continue to be the best option until Adobe unveils its replacement or until another competitor supports all of its features, including integration with other Adobe products, as Fireworks currently provides.
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Joshua Mauldin started with style guides with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. One of the first questions, understandably, was why use Fireworks for a style guide? For him, it was mostly because of symbols and styles. Sure, you could use similar things in Photoshop, but he found Fireworks’ implementation to be smarter. In this article, you will find out why you would want to set up a style guide using Fireworks, and you’ll also get a little starter template that Joshua likes to use.
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