I have been using Fireworks since 1998. I tried other tools like PS and Illustrator, and got away from tools like Visio or Omnigrafle long time ago because they don't fit that well on the way I am used to work. Some reasons why I keep using FW today:
*- Collaboration.* Most of your design process can be captured in a single file. I do off-the-track concept explorations and spikes in secondary files, but keep the approved concepts in one file to keep track of the design evolution from scanned sketches/screenboarding to wireframes to finalized production mockups. It is a great deal of help to have interaction designers and visual designers working out of a single file *- Lots of flexibility. * Since I do both interaction and visual design, I designed my FW stencil up-to-scale so that I can detach the FW symbols from the library when starting on visual design on a different FW Page and use that as a reusable starting point for graphic design, integration that saves me a lot of time *- Abstraction Management.* (Adam mentioned this already) FW has a built-in definition of views in different levels of abstraction or scope: Pages (a new level), States (formerly Frames), and Layers, which allows to easily organize your work into overall workflow, in-screen operations/states, and visual design. *- Holistic, Simplified Management of Design History. * Due to the ability to handle many design artifacts in a single file You can use a versioning system to document your design decision-making process so that your source file becomes till some extend a live-document. You can read the versioning logs to see a summary of the evolution and when changes were made, and of course you can roll back to an specific state of your design if you need to; so nothing is going to the trash. *- Rapid Prototyping and Testing. * Sometimes I want to test different interaction concepts for a apparently complex interaction in a relatively early stage of design and in a fast way. You can use the Preview view to run a quick, spike-like usability test through a clickable prototype, or you can export it to HTML as somebody else already mentioned. *- Efficiency. * Other graphic design tools seem to be too layer-centric in my opinion. I don't leverage that much on layers when working on a quick, dirty concept. FW creates a layer for each new object and groups them as I wish, I don't need to manually create new layers and name them (however, I do use layers a lot while working on the visual design later on). Since I expect a lot of changes during this part of the process it is nice not to have to worry about organizing and renaming elements that I may get rid of completely after a design review/test, plus, I reuse a lot of the stencil elements from the Symbol Library. To be fair, I don't use other tools heavily for a long while so probably my perception of this is dated Still, I go back to PS when needing advanced filters for image manipulation; and to Illustrator when tracing a complex hand-made illustration (and for some of its printing capabilities which FW seems to lack of). And I am sure lots of people can replicate most of the techniques I mentioned above in any of these tools. I just found a way to get what I need out of FW, and it fits greatly within my own design style and process (so far). And I enjoy a lot working with that tool. Hope this helps. Gilberto On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:57 PM, Michael Jones <[email protected]>wrote: > Illustrator still rules for concepting and sketching. Fireworks for > proper wireframing, making lots of similar screens, and production > graphics. > > For those of you about to commit to Fireworks for daily use, I would > recommend downloading the Fireworks Auto-Save thingy here: > > > http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/marketplace/index.cfm?event=marketplace.offering&offeringid=10210&marketplaceid=1 > > This side program is a complete hack, but can bail you out from the > crashfest that is Fireworks CS4. > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45590 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
