Did you know that you can use Fireworks in combination with other tools to create complex iOS prototypes (for both the iPhone and iPad) with similar ease?
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When you’re working in Fireworks — be it for a website design, mobile design or graphic asset for a project — one need you will undoubtedly have is support for textures. In this article, we’ll look at the Texture Panel.
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While vector based artwork lets designers take advantage of small file sizes and lossless scaling it can also be limiting when trying to add depth and richness to a design. Adobe Illustrator offers a plethora of gradient tools that can help artist produce more organic and vivid pieces.
This extended video tutorial covers a wide variety of topics including basic gradient tools (0:30), the appearance pannel and multiple gradient fill layers (2:30), creating gradients with the blending tool (3:45), gradient strokes (6:30), gradient mesh (7:45), using gradients with type (14:00), wrapping gradients with envelope distort (16:30), and using opacity masks.
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A well-functioning pattern library is a beautiful thing. It is a powerful resource that you and your entire team can use to efficiently create consistent user experiences for your website or service.
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One of the visual effects that is a mainstay in my Web design toolkit is the letterpress effect. Used properly, it’s a quick way to make text blend better with the layout, as if it were machine-stamped onto the background. Think of what a home appliance marquee or a professional business card looks (and feels) like, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
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As interface designers, we’re often required to demonstrate the look and feel (and interactions) of the interfaces we design. We often begin with a series of flat images, and while these may be pixel perfect and show some amazing detail, they lack the context of the user experience.
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This overview features a hand-picked and organized selection of the most useful and popular Photoshop techniques, articles and tutorials published on Smashing Magazine over the past few years.
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Whilst designing for screens—including Web, mobile and RIAs—you often need to create a prototype to see whether the application works properly before moving onto the development stage. Prototypes are also essential in Web projects.
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The absolute best thing about WordPress is how flexible it is. Don’t like it? Change the theme. Need added functionality? There is probably a plugin you can download or buy. If not, built it yourself! You can change pretty much everything about WordPress. In this article I’m going to go over some easy ways to customize WordPress that you may not know about.
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In all the years that I’ve been using Adobe Fireworks, I have always had to perform one task in every project: remove the background from a logo. Most of the time, it’s because the client doesn’t have the original raw file that their previous designer used to create their company’s logo, or because I need to work with a bunch of affiliate logos that I downloaded from the Web and not all of them have transparency information.
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