Fireworks CS6 Essential Training

Fireworks CS6 Essential Training

with Ray Villalobos

 


Join Ray Villalobos in this course, Fireworks CS6 Essential Training, as he shows how to create custom web graphics and web site mockups with Adobe Fireworks CS6. The initial chapters explain the basics: how to get around in the interface and create and organize documents. The course proceeds to cover all the essential drawing features in Fireworks, from drawing simple lines and shapes to applying fills, strokes, and opacity values to objects. The course also covers how to move, scale, and otherwise transform text and images as well as create symbols, use sprites, and integrate CSS and jQuery Mobile.
Topics include:
  • Working with the menus, panels, and object properties
  • Saving and exporting files
  • Optimizing graphics
  • Applying opacity, blending modes, and live filters to drawing objects
  • Drawing vector shapes
  • Masking objects
  • Animating with states
  • Using the 9-slice scaling tool
  • Creating symbols and symbols for sprites
  • Using batch commands
  • Creating jQuery Mobile templates

show more

author
Ray Villalobos
subject
Web, Web Graphics, Prototyping, Web Design
software
Fireworks CS6
level
Beginner
duration
5h 22m
released
May 06, 2012

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Adobe Fireworks
What is Fireworks?
00:00Adobe Fireworks is a vector and bitmap drawing program which allows web and
00:04user-experience designers to produce artwork that is used in a wide variety of
00:09web and screen-based projects.
00:11Web designers use Fireworks for rapidly creating scalable artwork using various
00:15design and prototyping tools, easily mocking up layouts with multiple pages and
00:21symbols, creating click-through prototypes of web sites and mobile
00:24applications, and slicing, optimizing, and exporting graphics in numerous
00:29web-friendly formats.
00:31User-experience designers use Fireworks for creating wireframes which can then
00:35be handed off to designers, applying behaviors to objects that simulate
00:39interactivity, and exporting click-through prototypes as HTML and CSS for client approval.
00:46Fireworks can be used for many types of screen-based projects, and it allows
00:49designers to create flexible and engaging artwork like this.
00:54Fireworks also allows you to import artwork from various creative suite
00:57applications like Photoshop and Illustrator and then optimize that artwork into
01:01formats compatible with Flash, Dreamweaver, Edge, and other web tools.
01:06For designing screen-based graphics, Fireworks is the designer's tool of choice
01:10when it comes to creating pixel-perfect graphics that can easily be deployed
01:14across multiple projects, browsers, and devices.
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Introduction
Welcome
00:04Hey there! This is Ray Villalobos, and welcome to Fireworks CS6 Essential Training.
00:08Fireworks is one of my favorite programs, and I'm really passionate about the way it works.
00:13I love how you can come in from Photoshop or Illustrator and understand the
00:17program immediately, because a lot of the tools that you use in the wheels chair
00:21in Photoshop are exactly the same in Fireworks.
00:23I'll start by showing you how to set up the Fireworks interface and organize
00:27your workspace with grids and templates.
00:29You can organize web sites in Fireworks in a number of different ways, with
00:33layers, multi-size pages, and different types of symbols so you can reuse
00:38elements and build interactivity in your mock-ups.
00:40You can even preview your pages and export a wireframe in PDF or as a clickable
00:45web site so your clients can quickly approve or mark-up your prototypes, and you
00:49can get the coding quicker.
00:51The CSS Properties panel makes it easier than ever to create
00:54cross-platform compatible code for CSS features like gradients, drop
00:58shadows, and rounded edges.
01:00Finally, I'll talk about JQueryMobile Integration, which makes Fireworks the
01:04best place to create themes for jQuery Mobile projects.
01:08Fireworks is the type of program that has a passionate group of followers.
01:12Once you try it, you'll probably wonder why everyone's not using it and
01:15what took you so long.
01:17So without further ado, it's my pleasure to present to you, Fireworks CS6 Essential Training.
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Using the exercise files
00:00If you are a premium member of the lynda.com Online Training Library, or if
00:04you're watching this tutorial on a DVD-ROM, you have access to the exercise
00:08files used throughout this title.
00:10So if you'll open up the Exercise folder.
00:14So in some of these folders you'll find files that I have opened when I begin a movie.
00:18In some of the movies you'll find folders that have a site and a
00:22site-finished version.
00:23When you see these, drag the site folder over to the Desktop--I like to hold on
00:28the Option key on a Mac to make a copy of it--open up the site folder, and start
00:33working with the files.
00:35So this is a Fireworks file you can open.
00:37This is an HTML document that you can just open with your favorite text editor.
00:41Once I'm done with the project, I also have a site-finished folder with all the
00:46files once I finish working with them on that particular movie.
00:51In this course I'm using a text editor called Espresso.
00:54I really like Espresso because it has a very nice live view that allows you to
00:57see changes I made in the code as soon as I type them.
01:00You can also use a text editor on the Mac called TextWrangler, which is an
01:03excellent free editor.
01:05You can get at this URL or also in the Apple App store.
01:09If you're on a PC, you might also try Aptana Studio which is an excellent text
01:13editor available for Macs and PCs.
01:16If you're a monthly member or annual member of lynda.com, you don't have
01:20access to the exercise files, but you can follow along from scratch with your own assets.
01:25So let's get started.
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1. Understanding the Interface
Learning Fireworks menus and shortcuts
00:00Like any program, Fireworks comes with a comprehensive set of menus that is
00:04organized to help you take advantage of different features in the application.
00:07I wanted to take a second and discuss the different menus as well as some of the shortcuts.
00:11A lot of the menu items available on Fireworks will be things you've seen in other programs.
00:15You have the Standard File and Edit menus as well as some menus you may have not
00:19seen before, like the Commands and the Filters menu.
00:22Out of the different menu options, you'll probably spend a lot of time in the
00:25Window menu turning panels on or off.
00:27Of course, when you see a menu with a triangle next to it, it means that there
00:31is a submenu underneath that option.
00:33If you see three dots next to a menu, it means that after selecting that menu
00:36option you'll be presented with an additional dialog box asking you some
00:40additional questions about your choice.
00:42If you find yourself going to a menu often, you should take advantage of the
00:46keyword shortcuts next to some of the menu items.
00:49So if I want to save this document, I can hit Command+S on a Mac, or Ctrl+S on a PC.
00:54Of course, Fireworks also has a context-sensitive menu you can access by
00:58right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking on a one-button mouse where you'll usually find
01:02the most relevant command for the task you're performing.
01:05So if I right-click on top of this text, you'll see some of the options
01:08available for changing the text styles.
01:11Fireworks menus are pretty standard, but make sure you take the time to check
01:14out some of the options and learn about the shortcuts.
01:17And definitely take advantage of the context-sensitive right-click menu since
01:20they will be oftentimes the only menu you need.
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Getting around your document and the Application bar
00:00At the very top of every window, you can see the Application Bar.
00:04This very small piece of real estate has a couple of important shortcuts you
00:07might find interesting.
00:09So let's take a look at the Application Bar, and also learn how to move around
00:12documents and customize a workspace.
00:15The Application Bar is usually inside the application frame.
00:18If you're on a Mac, remember that you don't necessarily have to run in this mode.
00:22You'll also have the option of running in standard mode.
00:25If we go to the Window menu and select Use Application Frame, right now it's on.
00:30You can turn that off, and you can see that we can move these windows around
00:33independent of each other.
00:35But I like the application frame because I think it makes things a little
00:38bit cleaner and easier.
00:39So I'm going to go to the Window menu and select Use Application Frame.
00:43Now all of our panels are docked together into one single window.
00:46One of the first things you'll notice in the Application Bar is a Hand tool, and
00:50a Magnifying Glass, as well as a Zoom level.
00:52The Hand tool is also in the Toolbar, but frankly, you'll probably never click
00:57on them in the Application Bar.
00:58It's much easier to learn the keyboard shortcuts for the zooming tools.
01:02To zoom with Fireworks, hold down the spacebar and the Command key together,
01:06Ctrl+spacebar on a PC, then click on the workspace to zoom in.
01:11When you are in this mode, you can also zoom in by dragging a selection
01:14rectangle around any item.
01:17To zoom out, add the Option key or the Alt key on a PC and click on the
01:22workspace to zoom out.
01:24To move around a zoomed-in document, just hold the spacebar down by itself and
01:28then click and drag to move around.
01:30If you click on the Zoom level on the Application Bar, you can change the zoom
01:34to one of the pre-selected options from this pop-up menu.
01:38These options are also in the View menu under Magnification.
01:43In this pop-up menu, you can also see the keyword shortcuts which are really handy.
01:46You can see that you can hit Command+1 to get to 100% view.
01:52Command+0 will fit as much as possible within the size of the current window.
01:57If you have an element selected, you can zoom into that object by
02:00hitting Command+Opt+0.
02:03Command+Plus and Command+Minus will also let you zoom in and out of documents.
02:08On the right-hand side of the Application Bar, you'll find the Workspace
02:11Switcher where you can switch between different workspace layouts.
02:13So let's try some of these out.
02:15If we go up here, you can see that right now we're in Expanded mode.
02:18If we click on that and switch to Iconic mode, you can see that we switched to a
02:22much more compressed version of the interface.
02:26Here's the Iconic mode With panel Names.
02:28I really like to start out in Expanded mode.
02:31The way things are arranged in Fireworks is fully customizable.
02:35You can drag and move panels around to any position and reposition them by
02:41moving them around and docking them into places in the interface.
02:44So you can see, there is double blue border that appears when I drag to this
02:47section, and now my Toolbar has moved into that position.
02:51So this is all moving together now.
02:54I want to click right here, and we're back to its original position.
02:58Now my panels on the side became undocked, and I'll just move those over to the side.
03:04I can undock these individual tabs and dock them back into position as well as
03:11moving around within their groupings.
03:15We can also collapse some of these panels by clicking on this little icon right
03:19here, which will take them to Iconic mode.
03:22If your workspace ever gets too messy, you can use one of these options in the
03:25Application Bar to put things back in main condition.
03:29If you find that the way the program is organized doesn't suit your needs, you
03:32can simply save your favorite layout into this menu.
03:37The last thing to the right of the Application Bar is the Help menu.
03:40Now let's do a search for solutions to problems on Adobe's web site.
03:45Just type in a question and hit the Enter key and the Adobe web site will
03:49come up with an answer.
03:51Although the Application Bar duplicates a lot of what is already available in
03:54some of the menus, it does put them in a convenient and easy-to-access location.
03:58I also like the way that the Fireworks interface is fully customizable. It lets
04:03you modify it for specific parts of your workflow.
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Working with panels
00:00Fireworks uses panels to give you access to common commands and tools.
00:03Let's go a little deeper into some of the panel options and see how we can
00:06organize our workflow.
00:08Before we talk about the different panels, go over to the Workspace Switcher and
00:12choose Expanded mode.
00:14This will reset the interface to make sure we're looking at the same layout.
00:17In this view, Fireworks shows you the panels you use most often with the application.
00:22You can turn the panels on or off by going to the Window menu and choosing
00:26one of these options.
00:27There is a large selection of panels in this area, including some panels that
00:30are less commonly used, for example, the Document Library panel, which is useful
00:34when working with symbols.
00:36Related panels are organized together into panel groups.
00:40You can switch between these groups by clicking on each one of these tabs.
00:43If you don't like the way panels are arranged, just move them to a
00:47different position.
00:48You can move them within the panel groups, out of the panel groups.
00:54Sometimes I like to have my Layers panel right next to our panel groups so that
00:58it's own the panel and it takes up the whole height of this window right here.
01:03Whenever you move around a panel into a dockable position, a double blue
01:06border appears and you can let go of the mouse and see that panel dock into that position.
01:10You can also change the size of panels by clicking and dragging on the edges of the panels.
01:16In some instances, you may want to see different panels be wider.
01:20To the right of each panel group, you'll see the panel's option pop-up menu that
01:24allows you to pick different options for that panel group.
01:28At the very top of the panels, you might see a double triangle that lets you
01:32switch that panel group to an Iconic mode.
01:35When you're in this view, the panel will expand from this icon temporarily.
01:41Remember that when you customize your interface just the way you want it, you
01:45can save your workspace with either the Workspace Viewer or by going to the
01:51Window menu, under Workspace Layouts.
01:55I really love panels and customizing often even while working within a project.
02:00Adobe understands that everyone likes to do things in a different way, and I
02:03really love the way that you can adjust everything and make your workspace
02:07seem just right for you.
02:09Moving things around and saving workspaces can save you a lot of time while
02:12working on different parts of a project.
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Using the Tools panel
00:00Of all the panels available to you, the Fireworks tool panel is one that you
00:03might end up using the most.
00:05You'll definitely spend a lot of time here, so let's take a look.
00:08The Toolbar in Fireworks is organized into six different sections:
00:12Select, Bitmap, Vector, Web, Colors and View, and the tools are grouped by
00:22function into those sections.
00:24So the Selection tools are for selecting, resizing, and exporting.
00:28The Bitmap and Vector tools are, of course, for dealing with bitmaps and vectors.
00:33The web tools are unique to Fireworks, and they help you deal with breaking of
00:36graphics and setting up hotspots for online graphics.
00:39Under the Colors section, I wanted to point out the improved Color palette in Fireworks.
00:44It has changed dramatically since the last version.
00:47The palette is larger and better organized, and you now have tools for
00:50copying RGB colors as well as switching between color modes on the Filling Stroke palette.
00:56There are now separate controls for Stroke and Fill Opacity and a few additional
01:00options when choosing gradients.
01:05Some of the tool positions in the panel have different versions or options for
01:09each tool, and you can switch between them.
01:12If you see a triangle underneath the tool, you can click and hold down the
01:16mouse button until you see a Tool pop-up where you can choose the different
01:19versions to the tool.
01:20This tool has a Crop tool and an Export Area tool.
01:26If you hover over a tool, you'll see the tool's keyboard shortcut.
01:29The Selection tools have two keyboard shortcuts.
01:31You can use the V key or the 0 key to switch to that tool.
01:37If a tool is already selected, when you hit the shortcut you'll get the
01:41alternate version of that tool.
01:43For example, if I hit the V key repeatedly, I can switch between the Pointer
01:47tool and the Select Behind tool.
01:50Learning these shortcuts will save you some time.
01:53I'll be talking about some of the different tools in other movies, but one spot
01:56that's really useful is at the very bottom of the tool panel.
02:00Under the View section, you can see the icons or switch between different screen modes.
02:04Clicking on those will let you switch from Standard mode to Full Screen with
02:10windows to Full Screen mode.
02:15More useful is learning the keyboard shortcut.
02:17The F key will also let you switch between these different modes.
02:22You can dramatically improve your workflow by learning how to quickly access
02:26some of the tools via their shortcuts.
02:27Make sure you spend some time with the Toolbar and check out some of the new
02:31changes to the Color tools.
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Working with the Properties panel
00:00The single place you'll spend most of your time in with Fireworks is
00:03the Properties panel.
00:05It's a multi-function context-sensitive panel.
00:08It is the Swiss Army Knife of Fireworks, so let's take a look.
00:11If you don't have anything selected, the Property panel shows the Document options.
00:16So right now, you can switch the Canvas Color, you can change the Canvas Size,
00:23and you can modify the Compression options for this document.
00:28When you click on an object in the workspace, the palette adjusts to show us
00:32just the options for that particular object.
00:35So you could see when I choose a vector object, then I can change things like
00:39the color of the vector object.
00:40I'm choosing a color from right here and create a gradient by choosing another
00:45Gradient tool and picking a couple of other colors.
00:51I can add an outline to this vector and change the Opacity and maybe the
00:57layer mode over here.
01:00When you click on a text element, you can see that most of the sections stay the
01:04same, but the second area changes to show the text options, like Leading,
01:09Kerning, the Font Style, and the Weight.
01:17And you can switch the Color right here.
01:20The Properties palette also changes, depending on the tools you have selected.
01:23I want to go to Select menu and choose Deselect to make sure nothing is selected.
01:28So if you click on these different tools, you should see some default options
01:32for each of the tools I click on down there.
01:34So if I click on the Text tool, I can modify the font in the Properties panel,
01:39and that will become the default font for this document.
01:48Looks like I just clicked in the area outside the workspace, so it wasn't showing.
01:52So you could see that now my default font for this document is Arial Regular at 18 points.
01:59In CS6, the Properties panel is the best way to work with color.
02:03There is a Color Swatch area that allows you to get the color from a Solid to a
02:09Gradient to a Pattern in just a couple of clicks.
02:17And right now, it might be hard to see because I have Color Burn as the mode.
02:20But I can just change everything about a vector object very quickly--and
02:26especially color is super-easy with Fireworks CS6.
02:29One last thing you can do with the Properties panel is collapse it to make it a little smaller.
02:33So if I just click on this area with the double arrows, you can see that it gets
02:36to be a little bit smaller.
02:38If I click on it again, it becomes just a little bar, and if I click on it one
02:43more time, it goes back to its original size.
02:46Most of the time, the Properties panel is the only panel you'll ever need.
02:49I use it a lot in conjunction to right-clicking on the workspace to see the
02:53pop-up menu that appears and almost never go anywhere else.
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2. Working with Files
Opening documents and setting up the workspace
00:00In Fireworks, you might spend a lot of time using the tools and the
00:03Properties panel, but the workspace is where you'll do all the work that will
00:07show up in your projects.
00:08So let's take a look at some of the options in this area.
00:10First time you deal with the workspace is usually when you're creating a new
00:13document, so let's go ahead and do that now.
00:15I'm going to go over to the File menu and select New.
00:18And usually, the first thing you do is type in some values for the Width and
00:22Height of the project.
00:23So I'm going to type in here 600 pixels wide by 900 pixels tall.
00:27You don't usually mess with Resolution because the standard web resolution is
00:3172 pixels per inch.
00:32You don't usually mess with the measurement systems either. Most the time you're
00:36working in pixels when doing things online.
00:39Next, you might want to change your Canvas Color.
00:41I like to set my Canvas as Transparent, but you can also set a custom color by
00:45clicking on this and then clicking on this pop-up panel and choosing one of
00:49the colors from here.
00:51You can also type in a HEX value or an RGB color right here.
00:56You might also want to look into this Templates button right here.
00:59If you click on that, you can go to one of these presets that
01:02Fireworks provides.
01:03So you can go to some of the most commonly-used templates for
01:08different projects.
01:09So one of the ones that I like is this Grid systems template, where you can
01:12choose a Grid system with pre-built grids for different kinds of projects.
01:17I'm going to hit Open.
01:18So here's a document that has a bunch of preset grids that I can use to
01:22create my web site.
01:23So I'm going to go ahead and close that.
01:26At the very top left of the Workspace, you might notice some Preview icons.
01:32Well, these Preview icons can take a look at what the document will look like
01:36when it's been compressed by the current Compression Settings.
01:39Sometimes it takes a minute to refresh the image.
01:43It might take a while, especially if your document is very complex.
01:46So if you see the bottom left-hand of the screen, it's telling you the size
01:50of this document is going to be, and then the speed at which this document will download.
01:55You can set the Optimize options in the Optimize panel so you can switch this
01:59from PNG to JPEG and you can mess around with other settings like Quality.
02:05I'd have to wait a little bit for it to take over.
02:08I'm being very dramatic with my quality here, so probably not something you'll
02:12want to do on a real project.
02:14You can also use the 2-Up and 4-Up button to compare compression settings.
02:18So this is what the original document looks like, and on the right-hand side you
02:22can see how it is now compressed.
02:24At the bottom right of our Workspace, we also have Animation Controls.
02:28If your document has animation, you can preview the animation by clicking on
02:31these different buttons.
02:32So you could hit Play, Rewind, or Fast-Forward.
02:35If you have animation, you can click on these buttons to preview and play your animation.
02:39And you can also see an additional area here to control the Zoom Ratio of
02:45the current document.
02:47But it's always easier just to use the command keys.
02:50Remember that Command+1 will zoom you to 100% view, Command+0 will fit
02:54everything on screen, and some of the other keys will also work, like
02:58Command+2 will go to 200%.
02:59Once you've created a document, you can save it as a template by going to the
03:04File menu and selecting Save As Template.
03:08The document will be placed in that Templates menu that we saw earlier and will
03:12be accessible anytime you begin a new document.
03:16So the Workspace has a few useful options, and it's a good idea to explore some
03:20of the things in there.
03:21It's especially a good place to quickly preview and find out how your
03:25compression will affect your document.
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Organizing documents
00:00Opening multiple documents presents a series of tabs and an opportunity to
00:04organize your workspace a bit further.
00:06Let's take a look at some of the options for optimizing how you approach your workspace.
00:10If you have multiple documents on Fireworks, a tab for each document will appear
00:15at the top of your workspace.
00:16You can switch to the different documents by clicking on the tabs, and you
00:20can reorganize the tabs just by clicking and dragging them around the workspace area.
00:24When you modify a document--so let me just grab this document and I'm just
00:28going to take this and scoot it over-- you'll see that a little star appears to
00:32the left of the document--shows that this document has been modified and needs to be saved.
00:37I haven't changed this one, so you could see that there is no star next to it.
00:40You can drag a Document tab to the right of the original document.
00:43So if I grab this tab and I scoot it over to this part right here, you could see
00:48two documents side by side.
00:50This is the original mockup version of this document right here.
00:53So you can compare how the mockup looks with the final document.
00:58You can also copy elements from one of these documents to the other document
01:02just by clicking and dragging them around.
01:04Just click this rectangle and move it over. You can see that it just copied over.
01:09I can do the same from this document and move that object right here, just by
01:13clicking and dragging.
01:14So it's really nice that I'll be able to have documents side by side, especially
01:18when you're working on maybe a different version of a document or a wireframe,
01:23bringing it into another document that's going to be the final project.
01:26So I'm going to go ahead and reset my Workspace.
01:28I'll drag this tab over next to this tab, and they'll be on two separate tabs.
01:36One of my favorite things to do when setting up my workspace is to open a new
01:40window for an existing document.
01:42I'm going to go to the Window menu and select Duplicate Window.
01:45This creates a separate version of my document.
01:48I'm going to drag it out just by clicking and dragging on the tab.
01:51I can place this on a separate window.
01:55And I'm going to go ahead and put this view right here at 100%.
01:59I'll hit Command+1 just to get to 100% view, and I'll go ahead and tag it to
02:06the right of this document.
02:07So now I have two versions of the exact same document.
02:10And what happens when you do this is that if you zoom in to one of these
02:13documents and you make some changes to the documents, it will affect the
02:17other document as well.
02:18So you could see that as I make changes to the zoomed-in version of my document,
02:23those changes will also affect the full-size view of my document.
02:27So it's a really good way of getting an idea of what my document is going to
02:31look like, even when I'm zoomed in.
02:36You can also use this with the second document set to Preview, so you could see
02:40how the graphic will look like after it has been optimized.
02:43Unfortunately, though, this is a bit slow.
02:47So even when I move this graphic over, my preview will update in the other
02:51window after a little bit.
02:52But it's a good idea if you're trying to optimize a graphic and you want to see
02:55how it's going to appear when previewed.
02:58Working with tabs and new document windows offers a couple of dynamic workflows
03:03that really help when working on sites.
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Importing graphics
00:00If you're more familiar with other members of the Adobe CS Suite, or if you're
00:04working with people who draw in other applications, you might need to import
00:08graphics into Fireworks.
00:10It does a really great job of bringing things in from other Adobe products.
00:13So let's check it out.
00:15If you're working with Adobe Illustrator, the easiest way to import graphics is
00:19to just have both programs open and Copy and Paste between the programs.
00:22So I'm going to select everything from this document and just go to the
00:27Edit menu and select Copy and then switch back to Fireworks and just paste the graphic.
00:34You can see that everything came in pretty well.
00:37Let's take out the layers palette.
00:43And you can see that everything came in as different paths.
00:47The document kept its look pretty consistently across the different programs.
00:52So most of the time when I'm working with Fireworks, I'll often just copy and
00:55paste between programs.
00:57If you do the same thing from Photoshop, it works pretty well, but the objects
01:00will come in as bitmaps.
01:01Let me go into Photoshop CS6, and you see that I have this graphic right here.
01:05That's an iPhone that I want on my project.
01:08And if I click on any of the layers, I can select that layer by going to the
01:12Select menu and choosing Select All.
01:16And then I can go to the Edit menu and select Copy Merged, and I'm going to go
01:20back into Fireworks.
01:21I'm going to paste that.
01:23And it does a pretty good job of bringing the graphics in.
01:26However, it doesn't do a good job of importing the transparency.
01:30If you need to import transparency, there's a couple of ways you can do it.
01:33You can save this document under Save for Web and then save this as a
01:38PNG-24 with Transparency.
01:41That will maintain the transparency when you save it from Adobe Photoshop.
01:46Or you could just import the PSD graphic directly into the program.
01:49So I'm going to go back in to Fireworks, and we can import a file by either dragging
01:54and dropping it from the Desktop, or by just going to the File menu and selecting Import.
01:58So I'm going to go into my Desktop and look for my exercise files and find the
02:03Exercise folder for this movie.
02:05And I'm going to click on iPhone.psd and then click on Open.
02:10Now, here we have some options as well.
02:12Here you can choose whether you want to maintain editability over appearance.
02:16In that case, it will try to keep all the layers separate, but sometimes it will
02:19merge things together or convert them into bitmaps as it feels like it needs to.
02:24Or you can choose to maintain Photoshop layer appearance or some of these
02:29setting, so you can flatten everything to a single image.
02:31You should still keep the Transparency but just bring everything as one single thing.
02:35So I'm going to say OK.
02:39And once you click on OK, you'll have the option of placing this document.
02:43This is actually pretty cool because you can drag your stuff and select your
02:45rectangle, and you can actually place the document within that selection.
02:50And as you can see, it brought in the transparency from Photoshop and even
02:55brought in every one of the layers as a separate element, so that's
02:58actually pretty cool.
02:59You can see the iPhone layer came in, and that layer was even logged in
03:03Photoshop, so it even brought that in automatically.
03:07So there's this little part that has a little bit of a shine on the edge.
03:11And here is the part that you would want to replace to put in your own
03:14interface right there.
03:16You can do the same thing with Illustrator files and you also have some control
03:19as to how they come in.
03:20So if you go to File > Import, and I'm going to import the same graphic, that is
03:24the buildings graphic.
03:26You can get a little more picky about how that graphic is imported.
03:29So you can ask it to remember the layers or just ignore all the layers together
03:33or bring all the layers in a space, which might help with animation. So I click OK.
03:39And again, the nice thing about this is something that doesn't happen when you
03:41drag and drop a document or when you copy and paste.
03:44When you import, you have this option of dragging and selecting the area that
03:48this is going to be placed into.
03:50So it resizes the document to that area, which is kind of nice.
03:54Firework's importing options are just a dream come true.
03:57It really does an amazing job of bringing things in, especially from other Adobe products.
04:02My favorite way to import is usually just to copy and paste, but occasionally,
04:06you'll want to do more complex importing.
04:09I especially like the feature of clicking and dragging an area, especially when
04:13you're bringing really big images where you want the images to be resized into
04:17a specific position.
04:18Fireworks really gives you a lot of leeway in how you bring things into the program.
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Saving and exporting files
00:00Saving files in Fireworks is a pretty common task, and you'll do that often
00:04enough, but where Fireworks really excels is in exporting graphics.
00:08So let's go over saving files and take a look at some of the Export options.
00:12Saving files is done from the File menu.
00:13You have the option here to save the file as a template as well, which
00:18means that when somebody opens up this file, they'll open it up as an untitled document.
00:23They can also select New From Template, and it will appear in this folder which
00:27has other Presets for useful beginning points for your projects.
00:32When you go to the File menu and select Save As, you can save in the default
00:36Fireworks format or choose from this list of other formats to save in.
00:41When you select something other than the default Fireworks PNG format,
00:45the Options button will light up, allowing you to check a few options for
00:49that particular format.
00:50The Fireworks PNG format is not a regular PNG file.
00:54It has all the information about layers, settings, and other document info.
00:58You don't ever want to use a Fireworks PNG and upload it to a web server for use
01:03in a web page because it won't be compressed.
01:06Because of this, Fireworks tries to rename all original files with an
01:11extension called .fw.png.
01:13You can turn this off in this panel right here.
01:17But I think you should definitely leave that on.
01:19It will make life easier for you, especially when you're trying to tell
01:22the difference between an original Fireworks document and your compressed PNG graphics.
01:28You can also choose Export from the File menu.
01:32And you have a lot of different options here as well.
01:34Fireworks is designed to help you export web graphics, so these are really important.
01:38Usually, you'll be exporting images only, but you can choose to Export HTML
01:43so that the graphic can appear on a page, slices if they're pressed and in the document.
01:47It's actually going to hit that pop-up when you do that.
01:50And select just the current page or all pages together.
01:55You can also click on this check box to put images in a subfolder.
01:59That way you can add an images folder to this particular web page that
02:03it's going to create.
02:04The HTML or CSS Fireworks generate, there's probably nothing you'd want to use
02:09in a production environment, but it's actually quite useful for creating
02:11mock-ups for web sites.
02:13I want to choose the Option here to Export Slices, and I'm going to select make
02:18sure that All Pages are selected.
02:20I'm going to go to my Desktop, and I'm going to save this project to the
02:22Desktop, so I'm going to hit Export there.
02:24Let's wait a few minutes.
02:26And once it's done, we should get a series of pages on our Desktop.
02:32So I'm going to right-click on this file and select Open With Safari, and you
02:37can see that this looks like a normal web page.
02:40And because I have built some slices with interactivity, I can see my
02:43roll-overs, and I can click on this to get to The Artists page and click on some
02:49other sections to see those other sections as well.
02:52So although the code that it's going to generate is not particularly useful for
02:55that production environment, it's definitely something that you can use to show
02:58your clients how the project is going to look like.
03:01One of the new features in Fireworks is the ability to Export CSS Sprites.
03:05So that's also one of the options right here.
03:07You can go to CSS Sprites and control how your sprites are going to be
03:11exported and saved.
03:12Sprites are single graphics that give you the ability to speed up how your site
03:16works by limiting the amount of HTTP requests that get made to your server by
03:21combining a series of graphics into a single element.
03:24We'll cover this in another movie.
03:26If you choose to export images, Fireworks will save the file with whatever
03:30settings that you have on your Optimize panel.
03:33So here's the Optimize panel and these pages will be saved as PNG32 files or
03:37the graphics that are in those pages are also going to be saved in this PNG32 file format.
03:42So I can switch that by choosing one of these options here or just clicking on
03:46this and switching to one of these other settings so that I can go to JPG here
03:49and control my JPG settings if I want to.
03:51And then all the graphics will take on whatever is in the Optimize panel.
03:55I'm going to leave it as PNG32 because that's the best default to use for web graphics.
04:02Fireworks has always done a great job of providing a myriad of expert
04:05options for your projects.
04:06I really like the way that I can preview my prototypes by letting it write
04:10some of the HTML for me.
04:12And although I would never use that HTML in the production environment, it's a
04:15great way to test interactivity.
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Optimizing and previewing graphics
00:00Although connection speeds have risen dramatically in the last few years,
00:03optimizing graphics is still really important.
00:06Much of a web site's speed is tied directly to the amount of graphics on a web page.
00:11So minimizing your graphics has a dramatic effect on your site speed.
00:15The Optimize panel in Fireworks handles most of your compression.
00:19In addition to having a pop-up with common defaults, you can also choose a
00:23specific format and just choose some of the sub-options from these
00:26different pop-up menus.
00:27One the web, the primary graphic formats are PNG, JPG, and GIF.
00:33Although Fireworks lets you save in other formats.
00:35You'll almost always want to work in one of these three.
00:38Each one of these formats has different advantages and disadvantages.
00:42GIF is by far the oldest graphics format and was created by a company
00:45called CompuServe in 1987.
00:48Unfortunately, the graphic format is limited to only a total of 256 colors.
00:52If I go over here at the Preview button, you can see that because it only
00:56has 256 colors, our gradients aren't particularly smooth.
01:00Because it has so few colors, GIF will actually generate very small files,
01:05but because of the gradient problems, it's not really a good format to use for the web.
01:09Unlike any other format, GIF files can also be animated, so you'll see that
01:14there's an option here for Animated GIF.
01:17So it can be one way of building simple animations, especially for devices that
01:20don't support Flash.
01:22GIF files often work best for graphics with just a few colors, but it's not a
01:26good format to use when you need to compress photos.
01:29To do that, we usually use a graphic format called JPG.
01:32JPG is a lossy graphic format, which means that as part of the way that the
01:36files are compressed, JPG actually changes the information in the original files
01:42in order to organize them in a way that creates smaller files.
01:45So I'm going to go over to a photo here and switch the quality of this
01:49compression of this image to something really small, so you could see some
01:52of what JPG is doing.
01:54Let me go ahead and click on this Preview button.
01:57So you could see what JPG is doing, it's actually compressing the image by
02:02changing some of the information in the image.
02:05And as you could see, this does create very tiny files.
02:07This file is now 34.45K in size, and if I take it to 100% quality, you'll see
02:15that it's much bigger.
02:16So the more I reduce my quality setting, the better compression I'll get but the
02:20more JPG will change the original and make it look worse.
02:24The JPG format works really well for photographic data.
02:26Let's take a look at what would happen if I try to save this as a GIF.
02:30Because of the limited amount of colors, you get to see a lot of banding,
02:33especially in the gradients of this photo.
02:35So this is definitely not a good format for GIF.
02:38It's much better for JPG as long as you stay with a good enough quality setting.
02:42So even at 64%, the photo looks pretty good.
02:45You could see maybe a little patterning over here.
02:48Because of the patterning, JPG is not particularly good at saving images that
02:53have a few colors or saving images with text.
02:56So one of the options that you can use for improving quality, especially when
03:00you have text in your JPG is by selecting this Enable selective quality option.
03:06You can try to make it select areas around text, and it will do a better job,
03:10but it's still not a great format if you have a lot of textual or graphic
03:15information. 'Til finally, the PNG format was created as a result of licensing
03:19issues with the GIF format.
03:21Thankfully, the result was a much more flexible and reliable format where it
03:25just supports a total of 256 colors or what we call an 8-bit color palette.
03:31PNG supports up to 32 bits per Pixel with 8 bits reserved for transparency.
03:36It gives you a magnificent range of colors with very smooth gradients.
03:40So you can see when I switch to the PNG format, our photo looks really nice.
03:44It looks as good as a JPG.
03:46However, it won't compress as well as a JPEG with the PNG format because it is a lossless format.
03:52PNGs cannot be animated, unlike GIFs, and although compression with PNG is much
03:58better than GIFs because it doesn't offer that lossy compression, it's never
04:02going to be as good as JPG when compressing photos.
04:05So graphics that this would be really good will be something like this, an image
04:09that has soft transparency.
04:11You could see that there's a little bit of a drop shadow with this graphic right here.
04:15So GIF is not going to do a good job even if we do a single Alpha Transparency.
04:20And hit the Preview button here so you could see the transparency in GIF.
04:24It's not going to give you the soft edge, especially in this wide area right here.
04:28If I go to PNG32, you could see that this image will blend really well into backgrounds.
04:35So PNG should really be your format of choice for most web graphics, unless
04:39you're using photos.
04:41You can limit the amount of colors in the PNG as well, and so let's switch this
04:45to a PNG8 mode, which will give you a little bit of banding.
04:48But sometimes when you don't have a lot of colors in the image--if this was
04:52maybe a logo with not a lot of colors-- you can switch the amount of colors that
04:57the PNG saves with and have as good compression or better as a GIF file.
05:03In addition to using the Preview tab to see how compression affects your images,
05:06you can use the Image Preview option under the File menu.
05:10Here you can change to the different graphic formats and set all of the
05:17different compression settings that you can't do in the Optimize panel.
05:21There's one more Exporting option you should know about.
05:24If you're working on a specific part of an image and you need to do a quick
05:28export, you can go to this Crop tool and select the Export Area tool.
05:32From there, you can drag yourself a little rectangle with an area of an image
05:37you want to export and double-click to see this image preview.
05:41And from here you can export just that image and choose different file formats.
05:45Maybe my image went somewhere. Sorry about that.
05:48So my image has moved out a little bit.
05:50So you could switch over here to get different graphic formats and then select
05:54Export, and export only that particular part of the graphic.
05:59So here we choose Images Only and select Export to export this to our Desktop.
06:04Learning to compress graphics can have a dramatic effect on the size of your
06:07pages, and Fireworks definitely excels at providing a lot of options for both
06:12optimizing and exporting graphics.
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3. Drawing with Fireworks
Setting up rulers, guides, and grids
00:00Grids and Guides are an essential tool in every designer's arsenal.
00:04Most of the stuff we do have to follow some sort of structure, and Fireworks has
00:08some outstanding tools to help you use and create Guides and Grids.
00:12So let's check those out.
00:12So in the Properties palette, you'll see that every time we click on an object
00:16in Fireworks, you can see that at the very bottom to the left-hand side of the
00:20Properties panel, you can see the X and Y position of this object as well as the
00:25Width and Height, which are pretty useful.
00:27A lot of times, though, you can really help yourself out by turning on the
00:30Rulers, which are found in the View menu under Rulers.
00:33So I'm going to turn that on.
00:34You could see that we can see vertical and a horizontal little tick marks on the
00:39Rulers that help us figure out our position.
00:41So you could see I'm putting my mouse right next to him up there and over here
00:44on the left-hand side.
00:46So that's kind of useful, but to make it even more useful you may want to go to
00:49the View menu and turn on tool tips, if it's not on already.
00:53What that does is as you grab and move a document, you can see right underneath
00:58your pointer little X and Y position marker.
01:01So if I don't have that on, let me go ahead and turn that on.
01:03It's probably not on by default, so now you can't see that information right
01:07underneath my pointer.
01:09So I find tool tips even more useful than the ruler tick marks.
01:13I turn those back on again.
01:14If I go over here, and I draw an object, you can see that line drawn on the
01:18object, but I can also see the width and height of that object.
01:21So tool tips make the rulers even more useful.
01:25You can change the origin of the rulers by clicking on the corner where they
01:28meet, right here and dragging this marker up to a certain point.
01:32So you can move them, say, to this position.
01:35This position becomes a new zero, zero point.
01:37You can see the ruler starts at zero right here now.
01:40And it is zero over here.
01:41So everything is now related to that original position.
01:45Now you could see that my X position for this element is at -1, so I can reset
01:51it by going to one here and maybe move it up to 21.
01:56So when you reset the rulers, that can be very useful when you're creating
02:00position element with CSS.
02:02A lot of times, you create position elements relative to other elements.
02:06So by resetting your rulers, you can more easily create those position CSS elements.
02:12To reset the rulers back to their default origin, just double-click on
02:15this origin point right here, and that will make the rulers be at their original position.
02:20The rulers can also help you position horizontal and vertical guides.
02:24To create those, we just click and drag these blue lines from the ruler and we
02:28can just drop them anywhere on the work area.
02:31Notice how the tool tips are actually telling us the X and Y position of
02:35this when we drop them.
02:36And this nice because objects will snap to this guides as you draw them.
02:40As you could see when I'm drawing this rectangle, if I get close to the guides
02:43it kind of snaps to that position, and that can be really useful when
02:46positioning objects or moving them around.
02:49You can reposition a guide by clicking on it with a Selection tool.
02:52So I'll switch this selection tool and set it close to the guide.
02:56When I do that, you can see that the pointer switches to this up and down
02:59pointer with some horizontal lines.
03:00And if I click on this guide, I can move it up or move it down.
03:04And this is kind of a cool tip too.
03:06You can position a couple of guides and if you hold down the Shift key, notice
03:09that you'll get this really interesting tidbit of information that tells you the
03:13distance between the guides.
03:14And that can be useful when you're trying to position some guides at a specific
03:17distance from each other.
03:18So just holding down the Shift key will give you this additional information.
03:22To delete a guide, just move it back to the ruler or away from the screen, so I
03:25can just click on this and kind of move it up into the ruler.
03:28And I'll get rid of that guide and pull that up to the left there and that gets
03:33rid of all the guides.
03:34If I also double-click on a guide, so let me grab another guide and put it back
03:37in there, and notice if I hold the Shift key while I'm dragging the guide,
03:41you'll also get those tips that give you the distances right there that is
03:45really useful for positioning them.
03:47So I can also double-click on these guides and then position them numerically.
03:51I'm really picky about exactly where I want them.
03:56If you go to the View menu, you can choose to Lock Your Guides.
04:00By locking the guides you will no longer be able to click and drag them around
04:03the layout and there are some other options in there as well.
04:06You can also turn off Snapping to Guides.
04:09Sometimes while you're drawing the guides will kind of get on the way, so you
04:12can turn off the snapping so you can more accurately place objects by just
04:16selecting this option right here.
04:18And finally, you can choose to Clear All Guides to get rid of all the guides at once.
04:22Sometimes Guides can be a little annoying, so clearing them will just let you be
04:26able to work on the document without any kind of snapping.
04:29Now, there's also the option of turning on something called Smart Guides right here.
04:34Smart Guides are Automatic Guides that get created as you move towards objects.
04:38So let's see if I can grab this Rectangle tool and then start drawing something.
04:42You'll notice that as soon as I get close to an object, it tries to give me a
04:46temporary pink guide that aligns to those objects.
04:50That can be really useful when drawing, but can sometimes be annoying.
04:53So you can control how those work by going to the View menu and selecting Smart
04:57Guides, so you can choose to Show them or Snap to them.
05:01So you can make them visible by using to Show or Hide the smart guides, so I can
05:04get rid of that and no longer have those guides telling me, although, they're
05:08still snapping, the objects are still snapping to each other.
05:11And then go to the View menu and go to Smart Guides and choose to turn off the Smart Guides.
05:15And what that will do is it will prevent objects to snapping to those Smart
05:19Guides that get automatically created.
05:21I'd like to have the Smart Guides on.
05:23Sometimes when I'm drawing they can be a little annoying, so I may turn
05:26them off temporarily.
05:27So really, all these things sometimes become annoying.
05:30So I'll turn them on and off depending on what I'm doing in the project.
05:35You might want to learn some of the command keys here, especially for hiding the
05:38guides because when you're working quickly on things, you might find that
05:43usually just turn things on and off temporarily.
05:48So I create myself some guides and I want to just hide them temporarily,
05:51I can hit Command+; or Ctrl+;
05:54on a PC, and just be able to see what my layout looks like without any guides
05:58and then just turn them back on by hitting Cmd+; or Ctrl+;
06:01on a PC.
06:03So any of those shortcut tips might help you become a little bit quicker and
06:07more efficient when drawing things.
06:09So turning on and off those things can be really useful, especially with the command keys.
06:14One note about Guides, they are specific to pages, so if you want to use the
06:18same guides across a series of pages, you'll need to set up a master page which
06:22you can do from the page's pop-up menu.
06:24So if you go to pages I want to set, I do have a master page on this particular layout.
06:29If you want to set Grids that affect all your pages, then turn them on, on the
06:33master page, and then they will appear in other layouts.
06:36I'll talk more about layouts on master pages in another movie.
06:39Once you have a nice Grid system setup, you might want to save your pages as a
06:43template or go on a special folder.
06:45So just remember you can go to the File menu and select Save As Template.
06:48And you can look at some of these templates right here.
06:51There's all ready some grid systems, but if you're going to be creating a layout
06:54that you are going to use often, you may want to create your own setup with the
06:58Guides and Grids that you want, and save them as a template so that you can
07:01reuse them on other projects.
07:03So you could see that Fireworks gives you a lot of options for creating Grids,
07:07Guides, and playing around with your rulers.
07:09If you're a designer, you're really going to enjoy using some of these.
07:12You'll definitely be quicker if you learn some of the shortcuts.
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Drawing lines and shapes
00:00Whether you're creating mock-ups, real art work, or prototypes, you'll spend a
00:04lot of time with the Vector Drawing tools.
00:06So let's take a look at how we can draw simple objects with Adobe Fireworks.
00:09So I'm going to go to the File menu and create a New file and just pick
00:13dimensions for this particular scene.
00:14So I'll make it 500 Pixels by 500 Pixels and hit OK.
00:21And then I can start drawing with these different drawing tools.
00:23Now, the simplest one of the drawing tools is going to be this Line tool right here.
00:26If I click on that then I can just click and drag a line into my canvas or my workspace.
00:32You could see that whenever I draw an object or anything in Fireworks, the
00:35Properties panel adjusts so that I can see the options for that object.
00:39You can see that I can change the Width of the line here by just clicking and dragging this.
00:44Change the styling for the line by choosing from a selection of predefined settings.
00:49So I can go to some very funky Calligraphy style lines here or choose
00:55something like some Crayon.
00:57And that didn't seem to do very much. Let's try switching to another color.
01:02And maybe you could see the edges being a little rough.
01:05Go back to Soft Line.
01:07We can also change how soft the edge is, and add a little bit of texture to our line.
01:16If I'm drawing something like a rectangle, I'll click on this Rectangle tool,
01:20and I'll click and drag around here.
01:22If I choose a rectangle, I can choose whether the line is inside the stroke,
01:26outside of the stroke or in the center of the stroke by clicking on these
01:29little icons right here.
01:30You can also switch the roundness of a rectangle by clicking on this Roundness
01:34section moving that slider up and your rectangles will be a little more rounded.
01:40Anytime you draw with any tool in Fireworks, if you hold down the Shift key
01:44you're going to draw only perfect shapes.
01:46So if I do that with the Rectangle tool, I'll be drawing perfect squares.
01:50If I switch over to the Ellipse tool, it will be perfect circles as opposed to ovals.
01:56So if I hold on the Shift key now and I move my mouse, you'll see that it's
01:59only perfect circles.
02:00Fireworks also has a super rich library of shapes that you can use for drawings,
02:04and let me go ahead and get rid of this.
02:06So go to Select menu and choose Select All.
02:08This is really one of the shortcuts that you will want to learn, Cmd+A or Ctrl+A
02:13on a PC will let you select all the objects.
02:15So instead of me going to Select > Select All, just hit Command+A on this Mac.
02:20You can use Ctrl+A on a PC, and then I can hit the Delete key to delete the objects.
02:24So you could see, that there's a lot of other shapes right here that you can use.
02:28So, for example, we have this arrow shape and if I click and drag, I'll draw an
02:31arrow and every one of these shapes has a lot of these different control points.
02:36So if I click on this and drag this, you'll see that I'll pull this extra
02:39piece of the arrow out, and I can control the thickness of the shapes like
02:43this with this control point.
02:46And some of these other things will let me control the roundness, for example,
02:49of this shape, the width and height of where this arrow is going to be.
02:54So any of these different smart objects here will have a lot of options.
02:58So let's do a Doughnut now.
02:59And again, I'll do Command+A and Delete to delete that shape.
03:03And I'll draw this Doughnut and I have a few control points.
03:06Another thing that you want to know about is when you're drawing an object and
03:09you want to adjust one of these points, if you hold on the Command key or the
03:12Ctrl on a PC, you'll temporarily switch to a Pointer tool.
03:15Instead of having to go to the Tools palette here, and then click on this to
03:20adjust, I can just, with any drawing tool, hold down Command key and get to a
03:25Pointer tool really quickly.
03:27And that lets me adjust these points. And I'll hit Delete key to get rid of that.
03:32Again, go back to the rectangle.
03:34I want to show that normally you draw from top-left to bottom-right, but if
03:39while you're drawing you hold on the Option or the Alt key, you can draw from the center.
03:44So if I click again, you'll see that I'm drawing from the center, not the top left.
03:49If while you're drawing, you change your mind about the position of the object,
03:52you can hold down the spacebar and you can move the object around and then
03:56continue to draw by letting the spacebar go.
04:00One option you have with rectangles is the ability to modify the roundness of the objects.
04:04If I click on here and drag that in, you'll see that my rectangle has round edges.
04:11The cool thing is as I resize the object, it will still maintain a
04:15proportional roundness.
04:18Another really useful shape is the Polygon Shape.
04:21So let me go ahead and get that.
04:23This Polygon Shape right here allows you to draw any kind of polygon, so I'll
04:26come over here and draw myself, this object then I can control different points
04:31like the scaling here.
04:32I could see that I can add additional sections or remove sections from
04:36this drawing like this.
04:38This is getting messy, so let me Command+A and hit Delete and do this again.
04:42So polygon, control the amount of sections on this polygon, go over here and
04:48split this up in to something that looks like an arrow.
04:52And a related tool is the Star tool down here.
04:55If I click and drag on that, you'll see I get a star and I can control the
04:59roundness of the edges with this pointer, right there and the radius of the
05:04inside and the outside of the star.
05:06And let me make my line a little smaller there.
05:10I'll take off this texture.
05:13And you can add and delete points by dragging this up and down there.
05:18And that lets you create some star bursts.
05:20So you really see they have a lot of adjustment tools here.
05:24And I'll get this thing a fill and maybe get rid of this line altogether.
05:28So I'll go here and I'll choose Nothing, it gets rid of the actual outline.
05:34And I get a nice little star burst that I can mess around with.
05:37So there it is in Auto Shapes Properties under the Window menu.
05:40If you go to Window and you go to Auto Shapes, you could see that you actually
05:44have more Auto Shapes than are in this particular pop-up menu. You have 3D boxes.
05:49The way to use this is drag any of these shapes over to the workspace, and then
05:54you still have all these control points that you can use.
05:56Let me go ahead and give these thing an outline because you can really see these
05:58better with a little outline.
06:02And try Pointer tool here and you could see the shape a little bit better
06:08when I turn it around. You were seeing it from the front.
06:11So just rotate it, and then you can adjust some of these points by moving them around.
06:18I'm going to try this one.
06:20It looks like it's just drawing a perfect cube there.
06:26Let's try this one.
06:32This one actually lets you adjust the Offset here so that's a little more useful.
06:39These couple of ones are really going to look good when you have an outline,
06:42so just make sure you do that.
06:43So at least I have to drag from here, and drag that around, here's the Offset,
06:48you can see perspective, so you can make one of these sides bigger.
06:54So take a look at those, those are quite useful, occasionally, I would say.
06:59You don't always have to draw a tube, but if you've got to draw a tube, check
07:03out the Auto Shapes they're really cool.
07:07So you could see that drawing shapes is pretty straightforward, and Fireworks
07:11does give you an amazing array of drawing options.
07:13Don't just go by this particular tool panel here.
07:16Take a look at some of these Auto Shapes because they can be quite useful when
07:19you need certain things.
07:21There's all kind of elements there and there is even ways of adding things to
07:24this particular Auto Shapes menu.
07:26We'll talk about that when we talk about Extensions in another movie.
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Selecting and grouping objects
00:00Although you'll seldom think about it once you've learned them, you'll be doing
00:03an awful lot of selecting and duplicating elements in Fireworks.
00:06So let's take a look at a couple of ways that tools can help you.
00:09Fireworks' default pointer is for making regular selections.
00:11So that is this tool right here which you can access by hitting the V key or the
00:150 key whenever you're in another tool.
00:17If we click on an object, we can select it, and if we click and drag on the
00:22object, we could move it around our workspace.
00:24If you want to add to that selection, you can hold on the Shift key and click on another object.
00:30This set of windows is grouped as an individual object here and I can move
00:33that building around.
00:34You can also drag a selection rectangle and any part of an object that I move on
00:39top of will automatically be selected.
00:42Even though it looks like I just chose that building, it actually moved the
00:45group of buildings in the background, as well as this background here because
00:49part of my selection included those objects.
00:52So I can deselect this background by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the background.
00:56And I just have the building group in the background, as well as this
01:00particular building here.
01:01So I'm going to hold on the Shift key and click on that to select just that one
01:05building, and then I can move it around.
01:08There's also some selection commands under the Select menu.
01:11So I can go to Select and choose Select All to choose everything or go to Select
01:15and select Deselect to choose nothing.
01:19Those can be useful sometimes, so make sure you learn the command keys.
01:23Now, a lot of these other selection tools really belong to Bitmap Selection
01:27tools, so we'll talk about that whenever we get to the section on bitmaps.
01:30If you've got a selection going, you can hide the edges of the selection
01:34by going to the View menu and selecting Edges so you can turn the edges of
01:39that selection off.
01:41The item is still selected and you can move it around, but the edges are hidden.
01:45That could be a little confusing sometimes if you're making selections and the
01:49objects that you've selected are hidden.
01:51So I've Shift-clicked on a few items here and I can move them around, but I
01:54can't see my selection handles.
01:56Sometimes that's useful because a lot of times you're drawing things, you're
01:59selecting things, and it's kind of confusing where the edges of those things that
02:02you've selected are so you might want to turn that on or off depending on if you
02:06want to see those edges or not.
02:08Most of the time, I keep them on unless the edges of the items become annoying.
02:12And I turn those off, so that looks pretty good there, and just Shift-click to
02:16grab all those buildings right there and move them around.
02:19There's also another tool for making sub-selections which is right here.
02:22So if I click on that tool, then I can click on the individual points of any
02:26one of these drawings.
02:27So if I click and then click on this point, then I can choose that point and
02:31drag that point around so I can make this have a much taller sort of antenna.
02:37And let's switch back to the Ellipse tool, so if I draw an ellipse and I
02:43choose the sub-selection tool, then I can click on these individual points and
02:47move them around and I can also click on these handles to reshape that particular element.
02:52Now, if I do that with the Rectangle tool, it's not going to allow me to
02:58reshape this object.
02:59It's actually going to give me an error.
03:00This is what it says, "To edit this rectangle it has to be ungrouped."
03:04Rectangles by default are grouped elements, much like these buildings in the
03:08background and that's because with rectangles, one of the things that we could
03:12do is change the roundness of the rectangle, which gives us these handles.
03:16If we try to, again, edit that object with the sub-selection tool, it's
03:20not going to let me.
03:21The reason for that is that it wants to keep this roundness parameter adjustable
03:26even when I reshape this rectangle.
03:28So if I reshape the rectangle, I want to make sure that my edges for that
03:32rectangle are going to be proportional and consistent with what the
03:36roundness setting is.
03:37So if I want to edit that rectangle, I need to first ungroup it.
03:41So to ungroup an element, you could just right-click and select Ungroup.
03:45It's also available through one of the menus.
03:48So it's under Modify.
03:49So Command+G or Ctrl+G on a PC groups, Command+Shift+G un-groups.
03:55That's really mostly the way that I do things other than right-clicking in this program.
03:59I want to click on this rectangle that it has rounded edges and hit
04:02Command+Shift+G, Ctrl+Shift+G on a PC.
04:06And then I can grab the points with this particular tool here and move that in,
04:11move the individual points around.
04:13So sub-selection allows you to choose sub-selections of a shape where this
04:19Regular Pointer tool just chooses the entire shape.
04:21There's also an additional tool that is not visible.
04:24If you click and hold down the pointer on the Selection tool, you can choose
04:27the Select Behind tool.
04:29If I click on that, I'll be able to select items behind other items just by
04:34clicking through them.
04:35So the first time I click on top of this particular building, it chose the building.
04:40The next time I clicked, it chose the building that's behind it or the group of
04:43buildings behind it.
04:45Those buildings are all grouped together.
04:47And if I click on it again, it'll choose the background.
04:50This is actually quite useful when making selections.
04:53Sometimes you'll have objects on top of objects, and you're really not interested
04:56in the object you're clicking on, but you're interested on the object behind.
04:59So sometimes it can be hard to get to.
05:02This one is particularly easy.
05:03You just click on it right there, but if you're in this tool then you could just
05:06go through the backgrounds and the forecasts by clicking through them, and that
05:10can be quite useful, so even doing things like selecting has a rich set of
05:14options in Fireworks.
05:15If you want to be really efficient though, you really need to learn some of the
05:18shortcuts like Command+A and Command+G so that you can select everything,
05:22deselect everything or group and ungroup objects.
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Applying fills
00:00Once you have an object, your next step is usually to style it with a Fill or a Stroke.
00:04In this movie we're going to take a look at Fills.
00:07We can apply Fills from either the Tools panel, which is right here, or from
00:10the Properties panel, which is down here, so we have to have an object selected
00:14in order to see that.
00:15Most of the times you'll probably use the Properties panel. Sometimes it's just
00:18really depends on which is the closest to your mouse position at the time, so really pretty similar.
00:23So you can see that Fireworks has a nice set of swatches that are very large and
00:27organized chromatically.
00:28You can set an Opacity also directly from the Fill here, so we can change
00:33that to maybe, say 20%.
00:35And now you could see maybe some of those background a little bit through the object.
00:39So if I move this around, it's very actually weak, so maybe make it a little
00:44more Opaque here, so 80%.
00:46You can see some of the objects through this particular object.
00:48And also, you can also set an Opacity for the entire object here.
00:52In Fireworks, you can set an opacity for every element that you have selected.
00:56You can also set an Opacity for the Fill of the element and a separate
01:00Opacity for the Stroke.
01:01So just be careful with your opacities, because this is sort of an opacity, on
01:05top of the opacity that you already have.
01:07Let me switch that back to 100% for right now. Move this back.
01:13Switch it back to 100%.
01:16You can also see that we can copy or modify the values for a color based on
01:20this Hexadecimal or RGB box right here.
01:23So if I put in a value there--so let's put 55 for this--that color changes.
01:28If I click on this, I can actually copy this value and then paste it into a CSS
01:33layout that I'm doing for an HTML page.
01:36So if I paste this, you can see that it's giving me the RGB value. Let me zoom out.
01:42I want to go right here and actually change my Opacity back to 50%, and then
01:47come back here and copy the RGB value.
01:50And I'm going to paste it.
01:52If I choose Opacity, I'm actually going to get an RGBA value so that's kind of useful for CSS.
01:58Fireworks has a lot of neat CSS features like that.
02:01Now you also have a lot of options down here from going to different types of Fills.
02:06So if I click on this object, I can make it have no Fill whatsoever, by clicking
02:10on this button, or I can very quickly go to the Solid Fill and choose a
02:14completely different color or click on the Gradient Fill and then click on a
02:18couple of swatches here for Gradients and apply that Gradient to that object.
02:23You can see that that is just a really quick way to access colors.
02:26I can even click and select the Pattern Fill here and select from one of the
02:30preset patterns in this particular pop-up menu.
02:33So we'll go back to just a plain color.
02:37And let's see. Something closer to the original. Kind of like that maybe.
02:42Let's take a look at some of the options for the Gradient Fill.
02:44So I'm going to go to Gradient Fill.
02:45You could see that I could choose--I have a swatch right here.
02:49I can also choose the Opacity of that swatch right there by clicking on that
02:52and moving to a different Opacity setting, and hopefully you could see how that
02:57affects the object.
02:58That color is actually partially showing some of the background, so let me go
03:02back to that dialog box.
03:04You can see that I can also change the direction of the Gradient by typing in
03:08a new direction here.
03:10You may have to move this thing, this pointer around.
03:12So once you change the direction, you'll probably want to move this origin pointer around
03:16so you could see how that Gradient gets reapplied to that position.
03:19So go back into this Gradient Fill here.
03:23If you click on one of these elements, you can barely see this, but there is a
03:27very soft blue outline to this particular Gradient.
03:30That just tells me that this is the Gradient that I have selected.
03:33So you can move that Gradient to the right or to the left to have it affect more of the shape.
03:39So I'll move it back over here.
03:41You can also use this pop-up menu right here. It's a little pop-up object to move this around.
03:46If you want to do it numerically, you can also type it right there, and we can
03:52hit Enter to apply that change to the gradient.
03:55On the toolbar next of the Eyedropper tool, you can also click on the Paint
03:58Bucket tool or the Gradient tool.
04:00The Gradient tool will bring these handles that you can just use and drag around
04:04to change the direction and strength of your gradient and kind of the position
04:09just by dragging around the beginning and ending points of the gradient.
04:13You can control the edge of the fill, so let me switch back to the pointer tool
04:16here and I'll just switch to a plain color.
04:20So say switch back, and actually notice that when I click on this tool, I
04:26have an eyedropper.
04:27If I move that eyedropper anywhere in the background, I can choose a color
04:32from that background.
04:33So I'm going to reset that building's color to the color of one of these
04:35buildings by clicking right here.
04:37That moves it back to what it used to be.
04:39So there's a lot of other options right here.
04:42One of the options is changing the edge of the Fills.
04:44So I can change this Fill from an antialias, which means it's the soft fill
04:48around the edges to a feathered fill, and that will give me a much softer
04:53edge on this building.
04:55So if I deselect, you could see that the edge is really soft.
04:57So I can control that by moving this up and down and make it a really, really
05:02soft-feathered edge or just a very hard edge.
05:05If I move it all the way to 0, eventually, it will become antialiased there.
05:09This is what it used to be at the beginning.
05:12If you don't want it to have some of these edges that happened, you can just go
05:14to a Hard Fill and that way, the shape will always be totally hard.
05:18So if I click on this, switch it to Hard, then you're not going to notice that
05:23little transition between the Pixels, until it's always going to be a hard,
05:27which might be kind of useful for this kind of shape, if you don't want to have
05:30some of those edges on the artwork.
05:32You can also a add Texture to any item, so I'm going to click on this building
05:36and add a Texture by changing this percentage, which is at the beginning 0, to
05:41something really strong like 85%.
05:45And I'll change some of these Textures here.
05:47See that is a really aggressive Texture.
05:50I can Soften it by just changing the strength of the texture and I'll make it almost nothing.
05:57So you can barely see it kind of in the background.
05:59It adds a little bit of a pattern to my gradient.
06:01I can also choose to make some of that background transparent, so I'll turn that on.
06:05You can see that it's even a little bit weaker, so I'll make it stronger.
06:09Some of the pattern becomes a little bit transparent when you do that.
06:12So let's try some of these other ones.
06:13So these are really cool, actually, for web layouts.
06:20There's a couple of additional panels that can help you with color.
06:23If you go to the Window menu, you can turn on the Swatches panel.
06:27And this is actually a little bit of a panel group, so you could see
06:30swatches are right here.
06:32There's another one called Color palette, and that one allows you to mix colors
06:36in a number of different ways.
06:38There's also the Related, kind of Related styles which we'll cover later.
06:41So let's go back to swatches.
06:43You could see that I have another sort of well of colors that I can pick through here.
06:47And if I have a custom color that I've made, maybe by typing in some Hexadecimal
06:51values here, then I can actually add that color to my swatches just by clicking
06:55on the Swatches palette, somewhere where it's empty and that will add that color
06:59to my swatches so that I can then use that color somewhere else.
07:02So if I want to make this building that color, then I just go to that swatch in
07:06the Swatches panel and pick that.
07:08You can also go to the Color palette tool and create a mix of colors.
07:13I think I probably like the one called Blender the best.
07:16You can choose two colors.
07:18So let's pick that one.
07:20We'll pick something else here like a blue and actually let me pick it from here.
07:24And from here, we'll pick up another one.
07:28And Fireworks will try to blend this color for you and give you additional
07:31options that are in between those colors.
07:34So I'll pick one of these options here and my background color becomes whatever
07:38I have and this is kind of a neat way of mixing colors.
07:40There's a lot of things you can kind of play around within here.
07:43So here, you have a selection of color swatches, and it's showing you the
07:47different levels of strength for each one of those swatches.
07:50You can pick some of these colors from here, or you can pick them just by
07:53dragging this around and some of these other points in and out of the strength here.
07:58So you can go to the selector and that just gives you more straightforward way
08:03of selecting colors either by Hue, Lightness, Saturation, Hue/Saturation values,
08:08CMYK, so all kinds of color modes.
08:10If you want any color that is not available in one of the swatches, this would
08:13be a great place to pick them.
08:15So sometimes it's really convenient to choose colors by any color mode that
08:19you're more comfortable with, like the HLS or the HSB or CMYK or RGB.
08:25If you want to be really granular about your color picks, those are very, very
08:28specific ways of picking colors.
08:31So, one of my favorite Fireworks tips is that you can actually copy and paste
08:35styles from one object to another.
08:37So if you have an object selected-- I'm going to go ahead and make this have
08:40no stroke, and I want to make another object of the same color--actually, let
08:45me make it harder by creating a gradient here, something that looks
08:48dramatically different.
08:50So let's say that I want to use that same gradient on this building, because
08:53it's such a fabulous gradient, I could go over here and try to simulate what
08:58I've done on this particular shape.
09:00But it's easier to just go to the Edit menu and select Copy and then click on anything else.
09:05Go to the Edit menu again and select Paste Attributes.
09:08I haven't memorized this particular command key, just because it's so gnarly,
09:11Command+Shift+Option+V, which you know, you have to have like six fingers or
09:15something to do that.
09:16So I just usually go to the Edit menu and select Paste Attributes, and that'll
09:20copy and paste not the object, but the styles from one object to the other.
09:26So Fills are a great way to add a lot of character to your objects.
09:29I love the Fill options in Fireworks.
09:30It really gives you just a lot of different ways of picking colors and I'm
09:34glad for this particular tip that lets you copy and paste styles from one object to another.
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Styling strokes
00:00Strokes are another important part of creating artwork.
00:02And if you thought Fills had a lot of options, Strokes have about just as many
00:06options in Fireworks.
00:08I really like the way the program keeps them available, but not show all the
00:12options in one place.
00:13So let's take a look at how that works.
00:15So I'm going to choose an object here, one of these buildings.
00:18You can modify the stroke in either the Tools palette, you have some options
00:22here as to where you want your stroke.
00:23However, most of the time you're going to be using the Properties panel anyways.
00:27So first I'm going to just give this thing a thicker stroke with a different
00:31color, so we could see it.
00:33And you could see that one of the options that we probably want to adjust is
00:36whether we want the Stroke to be Outside or Inside our object.
00:41Actually I can put the Stroke Inside the object here.
00:44Let me go ahead and make it a little less wide there, or I can put it in the
00:48center of the stroke.
00:49I could do the same things on this Tools palette.
00:52Those tools are available right here.
00:53I can go to No Stroke, Stroke Inside, in the Center or Outside, and I can also do
01:00my colors right here, including typing in RGB colors.
01:04Just as with the Fill tool, if I move my mouse position outside this panel, I
01:09can choose a color from the background.
01:12Right now, you can't see anything, because it's the same color as the object, so
01:14let me go ahead and color this object something else, and a lot of times you can
01:19get to them right here.
01:20Now Strokes also have separate Opacity settings, so you can set the opacity for
01:25the Stroke separate from the Fill.
01:27See that I have a very weak stroke right here.
01:30And let me go ahead and move that back.
01:33So right now it's at 20, I'll move it back to 100%.
01:38And Opacity has a setting for the overall object.
01:42So if I set an Opacity for my Stroke here, say I'll set the Opacity to 50%,
01:48you can see that the opacity for the whole object is still 100%, so I can control that here.
01:53And now this opacity will be on top of the opacity already on the object.
01:58So just watch that, you set the opacity where you want it, so let me move
02:03that back, back to 100.
02:08So in addition to modifying the width of the object as well as the position of
02:11the Stroke, you can also control the edge.
02:14And there's this pop-up menu right here with a bunch of Presets so that you can
02:18go to different kinds of Strokes.
02:21And there are a lot of options here, so you can go to Oil, Spatters, and get a
02:28lot of different effects by controlling these.
02:30So let me go back to just the plain basic soft line.
02:34And then here you can control the edge, how soft the edge is, so whether you
02:37want it to be really hard or really soft.
02:39Let me zoom in to that so you could see it a little bit better.
02:42And I'll give it a little bit more thickness.
02:49You can see now my Stroke is totally hard or somewhat soft.
02:53You can also add Texture to the Stroke.
02:55So if you come right here, you increase the amount of Texture and then modify
02:59the Texture so that it's something, shows up a little better.
03:01You could see it right there.
03:04There's a lot of options here, all kinds of grids and dots, just like you have
03:07with the Fill panel.
03:09So if you go to this pop-up, at the very bottom, you have this thing
03:12called Stroke Options.
03:13So you could click on that and just get very granular on all these different
03:17options that you have down here.
03:20But you can also click on this Advanced tab.
03:21If you really want to access Stroke Options, this is the place to do it.
03:25It just lets you modify the Stroke in any particular shape and way that you want.
03:29One of the tabs that I really like is Sensitivity.
03:32This gives you a lot of options for adjusting your Stroke if you have a Wacom or
03:36other pressure-sensitive tablet.
03:38By applying this Pressure field my Wacom tablet would adjust to the Pressure of
03:41my Stroke, so I drag that around.
03:44If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, some of these things are great options
03:46to add to your Strokes.
03:48So I'm going to click so that you could see the results of the Stroke down here
03:52and how it would look based on some of these elements.
03:54So right now, you actually probably want to make this Stroke a lot thicker to
03:58see some of those options.
03:59So even though that's a crazy thick stroke right there.
04:02I'm going to go back to Stroke Options, Advanced, and go to the Sensitivity tab,
04:08and you could see here that the Stroke will begin very strong and go very weak.
04:13And by adding this randomness, I kind of randomize how the Stroke gets bigger
04:17and smaller as the pressure sensitivity changes.
04:23Once you have the Stroke you like, you can add it to the custom list by hitting
04:26this little button right here.
04:28And that way, you can add something to this list of things that you see in
04:31Fireworks as a Preset.
04:33So if you get crazy with the Stroke and you want to use it in other projects,
04:36just go and hit this little Plus sign.
04:37If you find a stroke and you want to delete it, just hit the garbage can right
04:41here and it'll delete the custom stroke.
04:43So I like when most programs keep things simple, but I really love how
04:46Fireworks does a good job of making everything you're going to need, 90% of the
04:50time, immediately available to you, while still allowing you to go crazy and
04:53access a wide range of options and you could really see that in the Stroke
04:57options of the program.
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Applying opacity, blending modes, and Live Filters
00:00When you select objects, the Properties panel shows to the right-hand side
00:03several options for adding special effects like Blending, Opacity, and live Filters.
00:08So let's experiment with some of those options.
00:10So I'm going to click on these series of windows right here.
00:13See that the first thing that we could do here is adjust the opacity of the object.
00:17So if I reduce the opacity down, that object becomes partially transparent and
00:21you can see more of the background.
00:23So if I move that around you could see that it's a little bit see-through.
00:26I'm going to undo, so I'll set that back up to 100%.
00:31You can also change this area right here called Blending Modes, and there are a
00:35lot of options there as you can see.
00:38So that controls how an object reacts to another object behind it by using
00:42mathematical formulas.
00:43If you're familiar with Photoshop layer Modes, these are exactly the same thing.
00:46When you apply a Blending mode, you're applying a mathematical formula that
00:50decides how pixels on an element will affect those pixels underneath that
00:53element, so different things about a pixel color will affect the color behind it.
01:01And you could see that there are a lot of different ones that you could use here.
01:05They're really best experienced than explained.
01:08But, for example, if you use the Multiply mode the color in the foreground will
01:13multiply against the color of the background, which means that the resulting
01:16colors are going to be darker.
01:17Screen, on the other hand-- so, let's look for Screen.
01:21It multiplies the inverse of the object color by the color underneath, which
01:26results in a bleaching kind of effect.
01:28I could describe all the mathematical functions, but there are so many of them,
01:31they really most of the time they just kind of experiment with them.
01:34After a while you kind of get used to what each one of them does, so you just
01:38try out the different options.
01:40Some of the things like Opacity and the Color of the objects affects how these
01:44pixels blend with each other, so in addition to just trying out different modes,
01:48make sure you play around with the opacity settings and also the color of the
01:51object, and you'll see how those different functions work.
01:54One of my favorite Blend Modes that I haven't seen in other programs is the Erase mode.
01:58It's at the very bottom of the list.
02:01So if I go to Erase mode, you actually see that this object acts as a mask and
02:05what it's doing is it's showing you the background color.
02:08So right now the background color in this particular document is transparent,
02:12but if I go to the Modify menu and select Canvass Color and I'll switch it to
02:16something Custom, we'll be able to see that background color appear behind the
02:22objects, so this is actually making like a hole in our entire drawing.
02:26It is going through all the different objects and all the different layers and making a hole.
02:30So let me modify the Canvas back.
02:31That's the mode I really haven't seen in other programs, but it's kind of useful
02:36when you're trying to just knock something out.
02:39I will set it back to Normal.
02:41In addition to Blending Modes, Fireworks also offers a super huge library of Filters.
02:46These are called Live Filters, because they can be adjusted after you apply them.
02:50So if we go to Adjust Color and we do something like say Color Fill, then this
02:55will allow us to fill this entire object with a specific color, and as I said, I
02:58can still mess around with the opacity settings.
03:01So I'm applying this color, but only at a 28% strength, which shows some of the
03:05original gradients and colors that I had on that object.
03:08You can also use Blending Modes to control how the pixels and the color affect
03:12the pixel in the background, so you can get even more effects by messing around
03:15with some of these values right here.
03:17The nice thing is, once I apply a Blending mode, I can turn it on and off.
03:23I can hit this eye key right here, and then I can go back and readjust my settings here.
03:27So back to 100% and then try something else like Darken.
03:33Because photos have so many more pixels, these filters will actually affect
03:38photos a lot more than they will vector objects.
03:41So in addition to the Color Modes, you could see that I can apply all kinds of
03:44other stuff, like adding Noise to an object if I want to and add just a little
03:48bit of Noise to the object, that can be good for some effects.
03:52You can tell it whether or not you want it to have color in each one of the
03:56pixels that it adds and you can apply effects that are sometimes more useful,
04:00like Drop Shadows, so I can say give me a Drop Shadow right here and it creates a
04:04Drop Shadow for the effect.
04:05It can control the Position of the Dark Shadow in relationship to the object.
04:11Then the strength of the Drop Shadow is right here, so you can make it
04:13stronger or weaker.
04:15Control the Feathering of the shadow, so there's a softer shadow,
04:19and of course, also the Angle.
04:21And in a lot of the other effects you'll see these same type of controls:
04:25Angles, Strength, Color, et cetera, et cetera.
04:30Once you have applied the filter, you can actually change the order that
04:33these filters are applied and sometimes that makes a difference in the way that they show.
04:37So, for example, I move my Color Fill underneath my Drop Shadow, and now my Drop
04:42Shadow has a little bit of that color fill.
04:45So moving the filters around within this little window will give you a
04:48few additional options.
04:49You could spend half an hour messing around with some of these options, until
04:53you get your object just the way you want it.
04:55Another nice thing about some of the Shadow Modes is that they really do
04:58translate well to CSS.
05:00So when we look at the CSS Properties panel, you'll see that we can actually
05:03grab some of those values and incorporate it into our CSS projects.
05:07You can delete Effects by just clicking on them and then hitting this Delete button.
05:11You can also save your effect as Styles, so if you click on this button right
05:15here, you can save that effect that you've applied to this element as a Style.
05:20And notice that you can also see the different things that affect that style
05:24which are not only the effects down here, but also the Fill and Stroke color.
05:28So you can say I want to really apply this effect to another object, but I don't
05:31want to change the other object's Color or the Fill type.
05:34I just want to apply maybe some of these Noise factors and stuff like that, so
05:38you could really have a lot of control here about how that effect is applied to
05:42other objects as you select them, so then you can pick it up from this pop-up
05:47menu right here, and we could delete it right there, if we want to.
05:51So we'll talk more about styles in another movie, but I wanted to show you that
05:54you can save some of the presets that you've done.
05:56Remember that you can also copy and paste Styles by going to the Edit menu and
06:00selecting Copy and then go into another object and go into the Edit menu again
06:04and selecting Paste Attributes.
06:06That copies all the Effects and the Colors choices that you've made on
06:09that original object.
06:10You know, some things are better experienced than explained, and I've shown you
06:14how to use some of these filters, but this is really scratching the surface.
06:18So take the time to experiment with some of these, and I think you'll find them
06:21very useful in your artwork.
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Using styles
00:00The Firework Styles panel gives you options for using and saving Style Presets
00:04that you can use on many projects.
00:06Styles are a combination of presets from an object's Fill, Stroke, Effect, and
00:11can even have Font Information.
00:13If you don't have the Styles panel already open, just go to the Window menu and select Styles.
00:19So I'm going to choose an object like this bar right here and go to my current
00:23document pop-up here under the Style menus and choose one of these other styles.
00:27So I'd like to use the Plastic Styles a lot, and you can click on any of these
00:31and you'll see that style applied to your document.
00:33If we go back into this pop-up and go back to Current Document you could see
00:38that style appears right here.
00:39So if I choose Other options, those options will all be added under the
00:46Current Document Styles.
00:47And you can of course create your own version of a Style by picking a few options here.
00:54So I'm going to choose just a different gradient for this, then maybe I'll add
01:00an Inner Glow Filter here.
01:06Once I have the style just the way I want it, I can add it to this list by
01:09hitting this New button right here.
01:11So here I can give it a name, and I can control which of these options I want
01:18to save in this style.
01:19So if I don't want to apply that Inner Glow, I just want the Gradient, I can
01:22turn that off by hitting this button right here, and I'll hit OK.
01:27That appears under my Current Document Styles.
01:30I can also save a style underneath each one of these categories.
01:33So if I go to Plastic Styles, and I'm going to click on this one right here and
01:37just create a different version of this gradient and try another color here.
01:43Yeah, that blue looks good.
01:46Then I'll apply a filter, again I'll do an Inner Glow, a little softer.
01:52So now if I want to save that style let me scroll all the way to the bottom here
01:56and I'll hit this button and now I can add this style, hit OK.
02:03This adds the style to this option in this pop-up menu, so I can go to any of
02:08these Presets and add Styles to those Presets as well.
02:11So if you go back to the Current Document, you should see that New style appear
02:15on that list as well.
02:17So those are few things you can do in this Style pop-up.
02:20You can Rename the Styles.
02:21So if I click on one of these, let me go ahead and pick up another one of these
02:24buttons, and I'll click on this one.
02:26If I click on the Options pop-up, you can see that I can Rename the Style.
02:30You probably don't even know that the name exists most of the time.
02:33Another way you can see it is when you roll over these buttons, you could see
02:37the Style Name appear right here. You can also Redefine the Style.
02:42To do that you need to apply a Style like I've done here and then modify
02:45the Style slightly.
02:50And then while this original style is still selected, you can come over here
02:54to this pop-up and Redefine the Style, and it will take up the new properties
02:59that you've changed.
03:00Now, you can also have styles that have Text information.
03:04So you see there's a lot of different Text styles right here.
03:06I go to this and I click on this, you see that the new style takes over my text element.
03:12One of the nice things that I could do is Redefine this style so that it doesn't
03:17always affect the font choice or the font size of my objects.
03:21So let me go ahead and do that.
03:22I'm going to go to Style options here.
03:25And then I am going to say I want you to Effect the text, but I don't want you
03:29to change the font or the font size of the text that I have already selected.
03:33So I'll actually click all these off and then come over here and just to apply that Style.
03:39You could see that everything gets applied, but it doesn't modify my text at all.
03:43Sometimes you do want to make sure that you maintain those text options
03:47within the Style itself.
03:48Let's go back into the Current Document.
03:51You can also replace one Style with another by just clicking an option dragging
03:55on top of another Style that modifies the old style, with whatever we dragged on top of it.
04:01You can also break the link to the current Style right here.
04:05And what that does is make sure that this item that I have selected no longer
04:08has any Style applied to it.
04:10So if I redefine this Style again just by dragging another copy of something
04:14else to it, it won't affect the item that I'm currently on.
04:17So it breaks the link between the style and the object.
04:21You can also choose to Save Styles by going to this Pop-up menu and select
04:25Save Style Library.
04:27That will save the styles as a .stl file that you can import into other projects.
04:32So if you can export styles, that also means that you can import styles.
04:36And there's a lot of web sites like this Fireworkszone.com
04:39that have a lot of different styles that you can use in your projects.
04:43So you can go maybe this, 131 Ultimate web 2.0 Styles for the Fireworks and
04:47download an STL file to import into your current project.
04:52One more thing you can do with Styles is to change the size of this
04:56preview right here.
04:57Sometimes you may want to see a larger preview.
04:59So you can choose Large Icon, and you'll see the Style is a lot clearer in this view.
05:04I love the built-in style library that Fireworks provides for you.
05:07A lot of them translate really well to online work.
05:11The ability to save and add Style is also really useful, but I think the
05:15options that Fireworks already gives you are going to be sufficient for most of your projects.
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Styling with patterns and textures
00:00I like the option that you have in Fireworks to apply patterns.
00:03But I'm not too crazy about the patterns that are available with the program.
00:07So let's take a look at Pattern Fills and how we can add some of our own patterns.
00:10To add a Pattern Fill, just select an element. I'm going to click on this background here.
00:15Right now, it's a gradient.
00:16And I can go to this option in the Properties panel and choose a Pattern just
00:21by clicking on that.
00:23You can choose another Pattern just by clicking on this other pop-up and
00:27choosing something else.
00:28See that Firework shifts with a number of patterns.
00:32But I'm not really excited about too many of them.
00:35So you have one option just by going down here all the way to the bottom
00:38and selecting Other.
00:40So from here I'm going to click on the Desktop.
00:42Click on Exercise Files and then find the folder for this movie.
00:45And in that folder I have a pattern called wood-bamboo.
00:49This is just really a picture of my floor.
00:52And once I add that pattern, you could see that it appears as a pattern in this
00:57particular document.
00:58So with Patterns, remember that you can always customize them.
01:01I'm going to choose something else for a second.
01:03And when you add a pattern, you can see these little handles that you can move around.
01:07And these handles allow you to move the position, the orientation and the
01:13repeating of the pattern, so you can further customize any pattern you have by
01:17moving these three handles around.
01:18So Patterns are no more than graphic files, so you can actually add your own
01:23patterns by adding any sort of PNG, JIF, JPEG, or any other kind of file format.
01:28I usually stick with PNG, if it's a simpler pattern, because they compress better.
01:32But if it's a more complex photographic pattern, I usually go with JPEG.
01:37So it's very common to use seamless patterns on web designs.
01:39And with these Fireworks options, you can definitely add your own patterns from
01:43any file that you have created for your web projects.
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Drawing vector shapes
00:00The Pen tool is probably the most versatile drawing tool in Fireworks.
00:04It lets you draw curves or straight lines using mathematical equations that will
00:08render just about any curve you can dream of.
00:11It was popularized by a French automobile designer named Pierre Bezier and
00:15hence, a lot of software is known as the Bezier Pen tool.
00:18So let me go ahead and create a new document here under the File menu and select
00:22New and just type in a Canvas size here.
00:25I'll do 800x500 this time, and I hit the Enter key to just apply that.
00:30And here is the Vector Tools and one of these tools right here is the Vector Pen tool.
00:35If you're familiar with the way Illustrator draws with the pen tool, this is
00:39almost exactly the same.
00:40So this is actually one of the reasons why a lot of people like Fireworks, it's
00:44a really good combination of what you find in Adobe Illustrator but with a lot
00:48of the Effects that you find in Adobe Photoshop.
00:51So to draw simple lines, all you have to do is just click and then find another
00:55point in your canvas and then click again to create a straight line.
00:58If we keep on clicking, then we can create a more complex shape, and if we click
01:04on the original point that we created, and that makes a closed shape.
01:08So if you want to actually create a shape that doesn't have the beginning point
01:12and the ending point together, you can just double-click at any point in time,
01:17so this will end the shape and not fill it with anything.
01:19You can still choose a Fill here and choose a different line color, so I'll make
01:24that line thicker, but it won't be a closed shape like this one.
01:29This one can be outlined and it goes all the way around where this one just ends somewhere.
01:35Now instead of just clicking, if you click and drag with the pen tool then
01:39things get kind of interesting.
01:41When you click and drag, you see this Bezier curve points that allow you to
01:45create the shape by moving these points around.
01:47So if I keep on clicking and creating shapes, you can see that I can adjust the
01:53position of the curve by modifying these handles.
01:56So I'm going to hold down the command key for just a second just to get the
02:00selection tool, the direct selection tool.
02:02You can see that I can click and modify these after the fact to adjust them even further.
02:06If I let go off the Command key and that will be Ctrl on a PC, then it'll
02:12continue to draw the shape and if at any point in time while I'm drawing a
02:15point, I want to move that point around, I can hold down the Command key and
02:20adjust the position of the point.
02:23You can also change the direction of the handle while you're drawing by hitting
02:26the Option or the Alt key.
02:28So by moving this point or this Bezier curve handle this way, then the next
02:33shape will be affected by that new position of the handle.
02:35So I could do that again to create more sort of a hard shape right here and
02:40position my points wherever I want them.
02:42So let me close that shape, and there's that weird-looking--I think it's a whale.
02:47Maybe if I add another smile here, there, I have drawn a very nice looking whale there.
02:53You could use the Direct Selection tool to either click and select one of
02:56these segments and then hit the Delete key to delete them, and if you use that
03:00tool you can also click on anyone of these points and move them around and modify them.
03:05So like with other drawing tools, you definitely want to use some of the
03:09Command keys in here.
03:11So if you're in this tool, while I'm drawing, I can switch to the Direct
03:15Selection tool by hitting the Command of Control key on a PC and then modify
03:19some of these points.
03:23I almost never go from the Pen tool to the Direct Selection tool by clicking up
03:27here, I just simply hold on the Command key and that allows me to choose another tool.
03:32When you move these points, you can also hold on the Command or the Ctrl key and
03:36change the direction of the point after you've already put it down.
03:40So after I've already drawn the shape, if I click on any one of these and I find
03:44a Bezier curve handle, I'll hold down the Command or Ctrl key on a PC, then I
03:49can reshape that particular segment by modifying this handle.
03:53You can also reshape points if you have this tool selected, the Pen tool, and
03:57you go on top of a point, you can click on that point to collapse the handles.
04:01So if I click over here, it'll collapse those handles.
04:04Here's a handle right here, you could see it to the right, and I'll click on this
04:08and I will collapse into essentially straight lines.
04:11So there is more of a quadratic, I guess whale.
04:15If you instead, notice that if I move from my pointer on top of one of these
04:19points, it gives me the Pen tool with a minus sign.
04:22This means that if I click on this point, I'll also be able to delete that
04:25point by clicking on it.
04:27If I hold down the Option key while I have this on, then I can actually draw new
04:31handles by clicking and dragging outside this point.
04:35So I can drag a handle out of these points by holding down the Option or the Alt
04:40key on a PC and then getting my handles back.
04:44So I am holding down the Option right now, and then I'm clicking, and then I can
04:48pull a single handle or adjust the handles separately if I want to by holding
04:53down the Option key or just letting the Option key go after I click and drag and
04:58that way I'll get the two handles tied together.
05:00I can still move things around with the Command key.
05:03So, after a while, the Pen tool is so versatile that you almost don't need any
05:07other tool to draw any shape that you want.
05:09But you have to really get used to these Command keys sequences to make it
05:13really sing, and after a while you get to the point where you're not really
05:16thinking about what keys you're hitting, you're just kind of in the moment and
05:20drawing the shape that you want.
05:21So I'm going to get this thing a fill.
05:25And there is another tool that you can use right here called the Knife tool that
05:29you can use to cut a shape in half.
05:31So if you click on that and then just drag a line around the shapes, you
05:35essentially have divided this in half, so you can't see it until I pull it out,
05:39but that shape got divided with this tool right here. That can be handy sometimes.
05:44So if I want to divide this shape from this shape, and I can hit this tool right
05:48here and just drag myself a line in between a couple of points, I'm not going to
05:51be able to get those two points exactly, so it's actually going to generate
05:54another handle right here, you can see that.
05:56Now I have these shapes and they're separate from those shapes right there.
06:02Now a lot of people find that the Pen tool is just completely alien and they
06:07don't really enjoy drawing with a Pen tool, but they would still like to
06:10create vector shapes.
06:11So I'm going to hit Command+A to select all these shapes, and then I'm going to
06:15hit the Delete key right here.
06:17And one of the sub-options on this tool is the Vector Path tool.
06:22Vector Path tool just simply allows you to draw shapes with just the mouse or a
06:26pressure-sensitive tablet and then make adjustments to that shape with any of
06:31the line tools that you see right here.
06:32So you've drawn the shape, you can actually add any of these effects that you'd
06:36normally add to any line, and it's still a vector shape, which means that it can
06:41be reshaped with the Pen tool.
06:43So I can still click on this and drag out some selection handles, I can click on
06:49this and drag myself, maybe one selection handle to one side, just reshape this
06:54while it's still maintaining some of the properties that you apply through this
06:59lines options right here.
07:00Now this really sings if you have a pressure-sensitive tablet.
07:04You definitely want to go into this section right here, the Stroke Options, and
07:08go to Advance and then Sensitivity and control how the Pressure of your tablet
07:13is going to affect the objects while you draw them.
07:16So although Fireworks provides a rich group of shapes, sometimes you need to be
07:20able to draw just about anything you want, more complex shapes or objects, and
07:24with these two tools, you'll be able to draw just about anything.
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Working with freeform tools and reshaping vector objects
00:00Fireworks has a number of tools for reshaping vector objects, so let's take a
00:04look at some of what you can do with them.
00:06I'm going to start off by drawing some paths here.
00:09I'll choose the Vector Path tool and draw myself a path in this window here.
00:13Once I've drawn a path, I have a number of options for reshaping that path and
00:18one of them is this Re-path Draw tool.
00:21And what you do with this tool is you find somewhere in your path that you
00:23want to reshape and you click, and then you can drag out a different direction
00:28for that path and then come back and meet this path again, and Fireworks will reshape that tool.
00:33It does create a lot of points here, but it's one way of reshaping your paths if
00:38you would just want to change things around, especially if you don't like the
00:41Pen tool, and sometimes you kind of fail.
00:43So you have to be really, really careful, you can really mess this up.
00:47There you go and that reshapes that Vector tool like that.
00:49We've got a couple of other options right here underneath this menu, and the
00:54first one is the Freeform tool.
00:55A couple of ways that you can use this, if you're familiar with Flash, this
00:58is kind of similar.
00:59You kind of just push and drag out the shapes.
01:02It's going to be good if you just want to make a small adjustment to the
01:05particular shape you're working on.
01:06If you click outside the shape, you will get this circle and you can use that
01:10circle to push that shape around.
01:12Of course, you can change the Size of the circle here and work with a smaller
01:17circle if you want a little bit more precision.
01:22And remember that with any tools, if you want to modify the original settings for
01:25the tool, just remember that you have to first deselect everything.
01:28You can just go to Select and Deselect if you have something selected.
01:33You can click on the tool and change the parameters for how that tool works
01:37from then on, so whatever you decide here will be now the default setting for that tool.
01:42So if I click on this, then I can further modify that object.
01:48I've some other options here, the Reshape Area tool.
01:50It works a lot like the Freeform tool but it uses a couple of circles instead
01:54of a single circle. Not a lot of difference in the two tools.
02:01You can see that there's an additive and subtractive version of the
02:03Path Scrubber Tools.
02:05They are meant for if you're using pressure-sensitive tablets.
02:08You can change some of the parameters of the pressure-sensitivity with this tool.
02:12You can modify some of these settings here to control how the pressure is going
02:15to affect your drawing.
02:17I don't use these tools very much, but I can see how they could be useful to
02:19someone with a pressure-sensitive tablet or somebody who's really not
02:23comfortable using the normal Pen tool.
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4. Working with Objects
Working with bitmaps
00:00Although Fireworks is primarily a Vector Drawing application, it does have a
00:04good section of tools for dealing with Bitmaps.
00:07So let's take a look.
00:08A Bitmap is a graphic that is made up of a series of pixels.
00:12A photo like this always has to be a bitmap, but things like logos and artwork
00:16with few colors can be represented as bitmaps or vectors.
00:20A vector shape is resolution independent.
00:22So whenever possible you should use vectors because they are scaled nicely
00:25without losing resolution.
00:27So Fireworks has a couple of Bitmap Drawing tools.
00:29I'm going to make a new document here to show you how to work with them.
00:32So I'll do 900 pixels by 500 pixels here, and I'll just get a clean canvas.
00:38You can see all the Bitmap Drawing Tools are right here in Fireworks.
00:41So you can draw with something like a Brush tool just by clicking on it.
00:44You've got a few options right here, setting up the Color and the Size and the
00:48type of brush that you're using.
00:50So if I click and drag, you can see that I can draw that shape, and of course,
00:54you have an Eraser tool, on the canvas you can erase that bitmap just like this.
00:59So this is similar to any other kind of Bitmap tool that you would encounter,
01:03maybe something like Photoshop, but you do have a lot of options here especially
01:07when setting the type of brush that you're going to be using.
01:10So you can use a Soft brush here, and there's all kinds of options that you
01:14could use right here.
01:15If you really want to go crazy, go into Stroke Options, make sure you check out
01:19some of these options especially in the Advanced tab.
01:21If you've got a pressure-sensitive tablet make sure you add Sensitivity so you
01:25can control the sensitivity to the pressure that Fireworks takes into account
01:29when drawing an object.
01:31So when you draw a Bitmap, you're actually creating an object that appears
01:35in the Workspace area.
01:36So as you can see when I switch over to the Pointer tool, Fireworks has actually
01:40created an object that sits in a layer in our drawing.
01:44So this is a separate object, that anything else you draw, so if I draw a
01:47rectangle, you can see that this is also an object, but this is a Vector object
01:51where this is a Bitmap object.
01:53So if I want to edit a Bitmap, I have to first select this object and then
01:57continue to draw with any tool in the Bitmap arsenal.
02:00So when I draw this and I switch over to the Selection tool, you can see that my
02:05object here, that is a bitmap has grown a little bit.
02:08If I don't select this object and I-- let me go ahead and click over here to
02:12deselect everything, and I'm going to click on this tool and I'll also
02:15start drawing over here.
02:17Then if we go to the Selection tool, you'll see that it creates a separate object.
02:20So these are two separate bitmaps.
02:22That's one thing they have to watch out for when drawing with bitmaps.
02:25If you want the bitmap to be one contiguous shape, you want to first select the
02:29Bitmap that you want to work with and then continue to draw with that.
02:32So of course, you also have the Pencil tool that just lets you draw always
02:36super harsh shapes.
02:37That might be useful for if you're creating very small icons, you might want to
02:40go pixel by pixel, so zoom in and use that tool to turn pixels on.
02:44So I'm going to show you the difference between a Bitmap and a Vector shape, and
02:48the way that I'm going to do that is I'll first draw a shape with this tool.
02:52I'll just go ahead and set it to Hard Line and 12 points and the color red is fine.
02:58So I'll draw a shape right here.
03:00Then I'll switch over to this tool right here, the Vector Path tool, and I'm
03:04going to draw another shape, and it looks like they are pretty much set up the same way.
03:08Now these look almost exactly the same, but this is a Vector on the right-hand
03:13side and this is a Bitmap on the left.
03:15You can't really see a difference right now but if I scale these, so if I click
03:18on this, and I click on this tool, which is a Scale tool or the Transform tool,
03:23and I want to make this a little bigger.
03:26You'll see that I start seeing a little bit of blurriness whenever I scale a Bitmap.
03:31And let me resize this one right here, click on that tool again and just
03:36drag one of the handles.
03:37You could see that my shape is a lot cleaner even when I make it bigger so
03:42you can't see any of these old weird, blurry, jaggy edges that are happening on this.
03:48Furthermore, I can adjust this shape pretty easily with any of the tools so I'll
03:52switch over to the Pen tool.
03:54I'll come over here and I'll drag myself some handles, and I can move these
03:57points around without losing anything and everything is always a Vector that is
04:03displayed at the maximum resolution that my screen will allow at the moment.
04:07So Vectors are generally more flexible and better to work with in almost all instances.
04:11The problem is Vectors can't really represent photographic data very well.
04:15So switch over to the Bitmap area and you can see that this image, if you
04:19zoom in all the way, it's really just a bunch of pixels that are right next to each other.
04:23When you zoom in all the way these are all pixels of slightly different color.
04:27That kind of information is almost impossible to represent with Vectors.
04:32So it's really best left for Bitmaps.
04:35So there are a few options that we can use when we want to do things with
04:38bitmaps like select Bitmaps.
04:40So we've got some selection tools right here, the Marquee tool and the Oval Marquee tool.
04:43These are for selecting section of bitmaps.
04:45So maybe we want to select this face right here, and I'm going to move it around of course.
04:49You need to make sure that first you click on the Bitmap object, so let me go
04:53ahead and click on it first and I'll click on this tool.
04:56You will need to add the Command key when you make a selection and you want to
04:59move within a selection.
05:00So I'm going to grab this again and to move this out of the Bitmap shape, hold
05:06on the Command key and click and drag, you can move that out.
05:09So in addition to this tool, you also have the Oval Marquee tool.
05:12It just makes shapes in the form of an oval here, and I can move that around if I
05:20want to, by holding down the Command key or the Ctrl key on a PC.
05:23And then I have some of these more freeform kind of selection tools, the Lasso
05:29tool and the Polygon Lasso tool.
05:30The Lasso tool works by letting you just make a selection with your mouse like
05:35this, just a more freeform selection, and if you let go it makes a shape.
05:39Again, I can grab that and move it out, and if I'm drawing with this tool and I
05:44hold down the Option key, I can also make straight shapes which can sometimes
05:48make it a little bit easier to select something.
05:51And again if I let go, it completes the shape and it allows me to move that around.
05:57That's pretty much the same thing as the Polygon Lasso tool.
06:00It just lets you make selections in straight lines.
06:07I'll just double-click to complete that shape.
06:10So really, this tool does the same thing as this tool, if you hold down the
06:13Option or the Alt key on a PC.
06:15You also have the Magic Wand tool which allows you to make selections based on color.
06:20So if I click on this blue area, it tries to select some of this blue, and you can
06:24increase the Tolerance here and it will allow you to adjust how much of that
06:28color gets selected.
06:30If you turn on this Live Marquee, then you could see the selection kind of grow
06:33and shrink a little bit.
06:38And then once you do that, you can apply a number of things to the selection.
06:42So you could see that there are some filters that I can access right here and
06:47some of the filters are, for example, Adjust Color, and you could maybe change
06:51the color of that shirt by adjusting the Hue, increase the Saturation or
06:57decrease the Saturation, so it can really bright there, and the Lightness.
07:01So there's actually a bunch of filters that you can apply to a selection.
07:05Now this is probably not a good selection, not the best selection in the world,
07:10but it did do a pretty nice job.
07:11Of course, you have tools like the Blur and Sharpen tool.
07:15These tools let you selectively make changes to an image.
07:19So make that brush bigger and you can maybe blur a little bit of an image, so
07:26we kind of zoom in.
07:28So I'll make sure that I have the image selected and move the Intensity like all the way up.
07:37You can see that I'm blurring that image.
07:40There, of course, are Sharpen, Dodge, and Burn.
07:43These are similar to what you're going to find in Photoshop's Smudge, which I'm
07:46not exactly sure Smudge is the most useful of tools.
07:50It just kind of smudges the images around.
07:53And then you have this which is the Rubber Stamp tool, very similar to
07:57Illustrator, you can copy an area and paste it somewhere else.
08:00It's really good for giving people extra noses.
08:03Sometimes you can use this tool to make corrections.
08:05Say that you want to get rid of a part of his beard right here, it's bugging you
08:09a little bit so you can Option-click to set a reference point, and then you
08:13click and drag to copy a section to another area.
08:17So it looks like that works really well.
08:21For the most part I think Photoshop has much better tools for dealing with
08:24photos, and the nice thing about Fireworks is that it works really well with Photoshop.
08:29So I tend to do all my color correction and any sort of this photo handling in
08:34Photoshop and then just really copy and paste it or import into Fireworks.
08:40But in a pinch, you can get by with some of these tools to make small color
08:44corrections, maybe remove red eye, do simple things in Fireworks and then deal
08:49with the rest of the photo in Photoshop.
08:53So I wanted to show you a difference here.
08:54There is a Filters menu here and you can do things like Adjust the Curves and
08:59that just lets you make the photos brighter and maybe add a little contrast by
09:05playing around with these curves.
09:06This is really cool, but these are actually permanent changes to the photos.
09:09So whenever you use the Filters menu up here, you're making permanent changes to this photo.
09:14Let me go ahead and Revert this.
09:17It's much better to come down here to this Filters menu, and that looks a lot
09:21like the menu up there--has some of the same features.
09:24So we'll go back to Curves here and click and drag points to make Curve adjustments.
09:30So this adds a little bit of contrast to the photo, and I'm going to hit OK.
09:34Down here it adds it as a live filter.
09:37That means that I can turn this on and off and I can readjust my curves or
09:41anything about the filters.
09:43If I just double-click on that eye right there and then move my points around,
09:47and this becomes a filter that I can always adjust.
09:49So in Fireworks, you really almost never should go up here to this menu because
09:55it makes permanent changes to a photo.
09:57You should always go to the Live Filtered menu and add the filters down here
10:01because then you can always adjust the filters, you have more control later on over
10:05what happens to your graphic.
10:06Now there's even this option called Photoshop Live Effects.
10:09If you really like Photoshop effects, this is really duplicating what you see in
10:14Photoshop in Fireworks.
10:15This is a little bit odd because most of these can be done just through this
10:19Pop-up menu right here.
10:21So I really never use the Photoshop Live Effects but if you really understand
10:25the way Photoshop Effects work, this might be something you might want to look into.
10:30Fireworks does give you a set of tools that you can use to generate and edit
10:33Bitmaps in a pinch, but frankly Bitmaps are not its forte.
10:37Photoshop I think is a much better tool for dealing with bitmaps, and thankfully
10:41Fireworks does an awesome job of importing Photoshop files.
10:44So most of the time, I would say tweak everything here if you have to, but
10:48always bring things into Photoshop if you need to do a lot of editing and bring
10:51them back into Fireworks. It does a super job of importing things.
Collapse this transcript
Working with text
00:00Whether you're working on a wireframe, mockup, or small graphic, most
00:04documents created with Fireworks will have text elements and those needs to be
00:08formatted and styled.
00:09Fireworks has a rich set of tools for working with text.
00:12So let's take a look.
00:14So all text created with Fireworks gets placed in a Textbox.
00:18Click on the Text tool and I click on my work area.
00:21I can start typing text and it always goes into this box.
00:24So right now my text is set to be white, so I'm going to come right here in the
00:28Properties panel and just find a different color. I'll use black right here.
00:32You could see that the text is right there.
00:34It appears in a little textbox.
00:36If I click on that textbox, I can modify that textbox by making it bigger or smaller.
00:41If I make it smaller, it's going to try to wrap that text into multiple lines.
00:45Now you can also with the Text tool click and drag a selection of text so that
00:50it fits within an area.
00:51So once I get to that edge, it's going to fit within that width that I set when I
00:57created the text element.
00:59So I'm going to go back to my Selection tool and just hit Delete to get rid of that.
01:02Now you can tell this text to be single line text by double clicking on it with
01:06the Selection tool, and then you can this little pointer at the edge switch to a
01:10little light pointer, if I double-click on that, it's going to switch that text
01:13to a Single Line mode.
01:14A lot of people like drawing in Single Line mode, and sometimes it's really
01:18useful for when you're just creating a quick text, or you just want to make sure
01:21that everything fits within one line so you could do that really quickly there.
01:24Once you've entered text, you can see the Properties panel has a lot of options
01:28for modifying the text.
01:29So you could see things here like the Font Type, and Fireworks reassembles the
01:34list so that at the very top you'll see the fonts that you've used recently.
01:38So let me see, I'll choose Arial here, or I can choose something else, maybe
01:43something like Cambria.
01:47And then I can select different styles for that typeface, so I'll choose bold
01:51right here, and I can change the Font Size either by typing a value right here
01:55or by using this little slider.
01:57Of course, the color is right here which we've already done.
02:00So I'll switch it back. I'll make it a darker gray right there.
02:03Then underneath that you have other options like the alignment of the text.
02:07Right now this particular Textbox doesn't have anything that would be aligned,
02:10so let me not show you that quite yet.
02:12You also have Kerning or the spacing between letters that you can control right here.
02:17You can control Kerning also in a letter-by-letter basis by holding down the
02:21Command key and then using the Left and Right Arrows between letters to move
02:25those letters to the left or right so that really gives you a good typographic
02:28control over kerning.
02:30Of course, if you hold down the Command key or the Ctrl key on a PC and hold
02:34down the Shift and then adding the Greater Than and the Less Than sign.
02:39You also have adjustments for the Leading or the line spacing which can be done right here.
02:43Of course, I don't have two lines of text there, so let me go ahead and make
02:47this a little smaller and back into my Pointer tool here and I'll just make
02:51that go to two lines.
02:53You could see that if I adjust here, it's going to adjust there as well.
02:57Now again like with other tools, if I hold on the Command key and hit the Up and
03:02Down Arrows I can also adjust the Line Spacing between the characters.
03:07So a lot of times with text, I will be mocking up a paragraph of text.
03:13So I like to use a web site and I'll show you this web site right here,
03:18lipsum.com, that allows you to get any sort of length of Lorem Ipsum text.
03:24And this is just some standard text that typographers and designers use to
03:28mockup, maybe a paragraph of something that they are working on.
03:31So here you can specify how many paragraphs you need and you can ask it to
03:35generate the text for you, and it's just going to give you a page with a bunch
03:39of random almost looking text that you could just Copy and Paste.
03:43I'll just copy this small paragraph here.
03:45So Edit > Copy and then switch back to Fireworks, and I want to make a new
03:50Textbox here, and I'll paste that. Oops! Let me try that again.
03:55I think my font right now is a little bit too big, and I'll make it not bold.
04:03Click on the Pointer tool there, click on the text and I will un-bold it, and
04:10maybe I'll switch it to Arial.
04:11So this is really something good to use when you don't have final copy, maybe
04:16your copywriters haven't lent you a final copy and you just need something to
04:20mockup the design with.
04:21So once you have some paragraph text you can see these centering, little icons
04:27here actually work a lot better, so you can center and align to the right or a
04:31full justify right here or left align here, so that's pretty cool.
04:35And you could see some of these other options here, like indent the paragraph,
04:39the first line of the paragraph and if you have a multiple paragraphs, so let me
04:42go ahead and put a Carriage Return here.
04:47You can enter the space before or after paragraphs by moving these sliders right here.
04:53So after the paragraph would be after paragraph. Oops!
04:57So I just cancel this out by making them both the same.
04:59Let me go the other way.
05:02So it's space before and after paragraph.
05:04This is the Width of the current text object, so you can stretch text out like
05:08this, and this will be--if you want to select maybe a text character and make it
05:15shift up or down--its baseline.
05:19I want to do like a superscript. There you go, that looks good.
05:25And let me see if I can Undo all of these just a few times, so Command+Z or
05:29Ctrl+Z a few times just to get everything back where it used to be.
05:33So you see Fireworks has a full set of Text Tools that you use to control your document.
05:39Now you also have the additional normal controls, so you can add, say, things like
05:43Filters, Drop Shadows.
05:45You can even add outlines to text.
05:47There are also a lot of styles that have been customized for text.
05:52So if I go to the Styles panel, see that right here I have a lot of different
05:55Text Styles that you can incorporate into your designs.
05:58So I'll say Text Corporate Styles, and I can pick on some of these.
06:02So Fireworks does come with a lot of Text Styles that you can apply to your text.
06:08Sometimes I like to begin with some of these and then just go in here and modify
06:13maybe some of the fills or some of the Live Effects.
06:16And these are good starting points and you have a bunch of different sections
06:21even, so you have Text Corporate, Text Creative, and Text web Styles.
06:25So they are good starting points for special effects, or you can create your own
06:29with any of the normal controls that you would have with Adobe Fireworks.
06:34You can also attach text to a path so if you have a path drawn--so I'm going to
06:37go to the Pen tool right here and draw myself a small path.
06:40So click and drag some points here to add me some paths.
06:45Then I can select the path and select the Textbox right here, and I can go to the
06:50Text menu and select Attach to Path, and the text will kind of follow this path
06:56which is still fully editable.
06:57So I can go to this Sub-selection tool and click on any of these points.
07:01First, I'll click over here to click this off. I want to get just the point.
07:04So I'll click on this point and I can move that around and I can mess around
07:10with the bezier curves and adjust how my text flows through that path.
07:16So it's pretty easy to do, and I'll Undo that to go back to just to the
07:21normal textbox here.
07:23There's a couple of other options up here.
07:24So you could see you've got the basic Font, Size, Style, Align, and then you
07:28have things like Orientation, Convert to Paths-- other things that you could do with text here.
07:33One of the things that you might find useful is Convert to Paths. That converts
07:37the text, so I have this section of text selected here.
07:40If you choose Convert to Paths, it converts the text so that it's a bunch of
07:45paths, so it's no longer text. And if I zoom in and use the Sub-selection tool.
07:51So I'm switching to the Sub-selection tool right here by just holding down the
07:54Option key right now.
07:56I can click on any of these points and reshape the text as if it were shapes.
08:00So this is really cool because you could do anything you want to the text.
08:03The only thing is you are no longer be able to access the Text Editing
08:07Tools down at the bottom.
08:08See now this is just a vector, and as a vector you have standard Vector
08:13Properties down here into Properties panel.
08:15So this is no longer text, you can't adjust the kerning any other aspect of the
08:19text because it's lost its text status.
08:24You can also allow text to be inside a shape.
08:27So I'm going to draw myself a funky shape here.
08:29And I'm going to color that just nothing and I'm going to select both this piece
08:39of text and this textbox right here and I'm going to go to the Text menu and
08:44select Attach In Path, and that makes the text flow within that path.
08:50So you can kind of go around objects if you want to this way.
08:53And again, these things are re- shapeable, so I'm going to come over here and
08:58kind of control how this is shaped.
09:00And these again are just vectors so they are--you can redo them or attach
09:05handles to them just by going to the Pen tool and click on any of these edges
09:09and that what makes it more circular kind of text, and just make this follow any path you want.
09:15So I'll Undo that a few times just to get the original textbox back.
09:20Delete this right here.
09:21So you can see that Fireworks is really no slouch when it comes to text. It has
09:25a whole set of options that compete with just about any other program out there.
09:28I really like the text features.
09:30You really use them a lot, especially when working with mockups.
09:33It's good to see that it has a comprehensive set of features that you can use
09:36when working with text.
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Aligning and distributing elements
00:00Fireworks has some great Alignment and Distribution Tools that make it easier
00:04to organize objects to each other to the stage and even space things in different ways.
00:08So let's take a look.
00:10If you're really interested in aligning things, you definitely want to look at
00:13the View menu and turn on underneath the Smart Guides to show Smart Guides.
00:19When you're drawing with Smart Guides on, you can see that as I bring an object
00:23close to another object, it finds those object edges and tries to align them and
00:28tries to align them automatically by giving me these pink little guides that I
00:31can use to bring objects together.
00:33This is almost the perfect tool to align things.
00:35Unfortunately, it's not going to able to distribute the spaces in between things
00:38evenly, and sometimes it's not perfect,
00:40especially if you've got objects that are maybe a pixel off to one side, and what
00:45happens then is it will kind of get confused as to which object you want to
00:49align with, so that can be a little bit tricky.
00:52So there are a few tools available in the Modify menu.
00:56So if I select some objects here and go to Modify menu and you can see that
01:00under Align, there are a few options here, Align to the Left, Vertical Center.
01:05So Left align aligns the objects to the left-most objects, and that's kind of
01:09important to look at.
01:10So I'm going to grab these, kind of position them like this and go to the Modify
01:14menu, Align and say Align to Left.
01:17Notice that they are all going to move to the left-most object.
01:21Same thing if I align to the right, if I go Modify > Align > Align to Right,
01:26then it's going to move them to the right-most object.
01:28And in the case of centering, it's going to just find the center of all of them
01:33and move them towards each other, average kind of the centers of all of them and
01:36bring them together.
01:37Same thing happens when you use the Top, Center Horizontal, and Bottom.
01:42You can choose the Distribute Widths and Heights, and this menu is okay, but it's
01:46not really the best way to do this.
01:47It's actually a whole Align panel that you can find by going to the Window menu
01:52and then finding the Align Option here which is right down there.
01:56This tool has a few extra options, and it's really the best place to align
01:59because it has the most flexibility.
02:01So let me move this back in here, and I can show you some of these options.
02:05So if I select some objects like this, actually this is right now a grouped object.
02:10So let me go ahead and ungroup it.
02:12I'm going to do Command+Shift+G, it will be Ctrl+Shift+G on a PC, and I'm going
02:17to kind of offset these a little bit.
02:19So I'll select these three objects and I can align these to the left edge,
02:24again it does the same things, moves all the objects toward to the leftmost
02:28object, and Undo that.
02:30Align to Center, so it's going to average their centers or Align to Right, it's
02:34going to do the same thing align everything to the rightmost object.
02:37You can also align to the top edge. That's useful if you have something like this.
02:42Click, click, click, and Align to the Top edge move towards the topmost object,
02:49Align to the Center averages all the centers of all the objects, and Align to the
02:53Bottom moves everything towards the bottommost object.
02:57Distributing just means bringing the spacing in between the objects to be the
03:01same, so you could go ahead and hit Distribute Horizontal Center.
03:04So if you click on any of these tools it's going to leave the leftmost and the
03:09rightmost object in their own spots.
03:11So I'll move this like here.
03:13So if I click on these three and I do this Distribute Horizontal Center, it will
03:17leave the left and the right objects in the same place and move this one towards
03:21it, and the same thing Distribute Right.
03:24These right now, because these particular shapes are the same exact size, this
03:28is not going to make a huge difference.
03:29But if they were different size shapes, some of these tools might make a
03:32little bit of difference as to whether you distribute to the right edge, to the left edge.
03:36But because these are 90 pixels by 90 pixels wide little bitmaps, it's not going
03:40to make a big difference there.
03:42This is really cool down here.
03:43You can match to the size of an object.
03:46So say that you've got these three objects and I'm going to go ahead and group
03:49them like I had them before.
03:50So Command+G or Ctrl+G on a PC and I want to draw maybe a little bar, a little
03:55design element over here to the left, and let's give that a color.
04:01I messed up, and I didn't make it the exact height of this object, so I can
04:05select this group right here and this object and tell it that I want it to match
04:09this height of the object, and it's going to pick the tallest object.
04:13When I click on it, it's going to match the shortest object to the tallest object.
04:17And that brings me to another point.
04:19Sometimes you want to group things to make sure that the objects that are being
04:22compared are the group, not the individual elements, because if I undid this and
04:27just go ahead and ungroup them.
04:29So Command+Shift+G, ungroup them, and select this and I said Match height, then
04:35it's going to try to match the height of each one of these individual pictures
04:38to the longest thing, which is this element right here.
04:41It's not really what we wanted, so definitely when you're doing distributing or
04:45aligning you definitely want to group things when you want to compare things to
04:49a specific group of elements.
04:52So this is actually pretty cool.
04:53Match Size, I haven't really seen this in a lot of programs.
04:56So I could click on this and click on-- let's go ahead and make this one smaller.
05:00I'm going to make this and do that and I can match both of these sizes.
05:04Now I know these are exactly the same size, I can align them to the top, and
05:08there I have a box that's exactly the same size as this element right here.
05:12The other thing that you could do is Space evenly horizontally or vertically and
05:16that's kind of cool, almost like a distribute right now.
05:19Let me Undo these objects, so again, Command+Shift+G. So I can grab these
05:24elements, and say that I want to distribute evenly between these objects, exactly
05:28like a distribute, it just moves them towards each other.
05:30You might be asking, "Why would I want to do that?" Well, there is an option right
05:33here where you can actually type in a pixel size, so you could say I want to
05:36space these objects so that they have 15 pixels in between each of the objects
05:41and they were already, I think 15 pixels, so you didn't see anything happening.
05:45So I'm going to select them again.
05:47And I'll do this, and then I'll Space them evenly.
05:53They are spaced evenly, but now they have exactly 15 pixels in between, and that
05:56can be really useful when you're trying to make a grid of a very specific size
06:00for any particular design that you're making.
06:02So you space something evenly to a specific pixel size right here, either
06:07horizontally or vertically, that's super useful.
06:10One last thing you might want to do is center something around the stage.
06:14So right now this little box right here says Center Everything Relative to Another Object.
06:19And I have two objects, everything is going to be done relative to those objects.
06:23I want to center this group of pictures on the page, and what I want to do
06:26is select all these pictures, I'm going to hit Command+G or Ctrl+G on a PC for grouping.
06:31Then I can turn this button on and it's going to say now Relative to Canvas.
06:35Now when I click Align to the Center, it's going to align that object to the
06:38center of the canvas.
06:40When I click on this, it's going to align everything to the center of the canvas
06:44vertically in this case.
06:45So these two tools will allow you to center things to the canvas, and everything
06:50else will work in relation to the canvass when you have this extra little button
06:53on, that can be actually quite useful sometimes.
06:56So the Align panel is so simple and straightforward.
06:59If you notice it's one of the only panels that doesn't even have an Options Pop-Up.
07:02What you see is pretty much what you get, and it's super useful when you're
07:05creating space and relationships between objects.
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Transforming objects
00:00Scaling and transforming are common tasks when preparing web graphics.
00:05So let's take a look at of some of the options you have at your disposal.
00:08So the first tool you might want to use is this Transform tool.
00:10This is a multipurpose tool.
00:12It's called the Scale tool here, but when you click on it you could see that it
00:16allows you to do a number of transformations.
00:18First one of course is scaling, if you just click on an object to make it bigger.
00:22You can click and drag it on anyone of these edges to make the object wider or taller.
00:28If you notice when I put my mouse close to the object, sometimes I get these
00:32rotation handles that means that I can click and drag to rotate the object
00:35around its center point.
00:37So let me click on that again, and notice that in the middle of the object I
00:43also have a Registration point, and any of these Scaling Tools or any of these
00:47Transformation Tools going to move this Registration Points so that things
00:51rotate or skew or move according to that point.
00:53So now when I rotate I'm moving in relationship to where this point is right
00:57here and I can move that by just clicking and dragging it to whatever corner I
01:02want to rotate or move from.
01:04So if I click and rotate here, I will rotate around that point, and I'm undoing
01:09right now to get back to the original position here, so Command+Z or Ctrl+Z on a PC.
01:14There is also a Skew tool.
01:16You can get to like this, and the Skew tool just allows you to skew things to
01:21the right or to the left.
01:23Again, you can move the Registration Point, and that adjusts to that
01:27Registration Point.
01:28When you want to apply any of these transformations, just double-click in the
01:32center and that transformation will be applied.
01:34So I'm going to Undo that, Command+Z on a Mac, Ctrl+Z on a PC.
01:39Then you have the Distortion Option here and that just lets you grab some of
01:44these corners and distort them like if you were stretching a rubber band.
01:48Double-click to apply, same thing with the Registration Point, see that that is
01:52a dramatic transformation when you skew things.
01:57Some of these options are also available under the Modify menu.
02:01You could see that there is a Transform Sub menu here, and there's a number of options here.
02:06There is one called Free Transform.
02:08That is essentially the Scale tool, so if I choose that, then I can do
02:12everything that I can do with the Scale tool, and you might want to learn the
02:15Command key for that.
02:16It's really common to just use Command+T to get to that multipurpose Transform tool.
02:21So Command+T, and then I can stretch things out, rotate them, and move them
02:26around in anyway that I want.
02:27I still have the Registration point, that doesn't have to be on any particular
02:31corner, it can be anywhere so I can rotate around at this point now and
02:36double-click to accept my changes.
02:39You can also go to the Modify > Transform menu here and choose a Numeric
02:44Transform, which will give you a lot of options.
02:46So you go to any of these types of transformations and do things numerically.
02:50So I'll Scale or Rotate, and say Rotate, and then you can type an angle.
02:55So I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees, then I'm going to say OK and it just
02:59rotates that graphic numerically.
03:01Sometimes you want to be able to type the numbers exactly on a transformation so
03:06that how you do that.
03:06So these are pretty easy to use, most of the time you just hit Command+T or
03:10Ctrl+T to get to this menu, so make sure you learn that keyboard shortcut.
03:15But between these Transformation Tools and the Menus, you can transform any
03:19object to just about any shape you want.
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Moving, cloning, and duplicating
00:00A common task when drawing is to Move, Clone, and Duplicate objects, and
00:05Fireworks makes that really easy to do.
00:06So let's take a look.
00:08I'm going to go ahead and create a new document here, 900x500 pixels, hit OK.
00:13And I'm going to make myself a little grid of images, so I'm going to click on
00:17this Rectangle tool right here and I'm going to click and drag a rectangle.
00:21I'm not really going to be picky about what size it is right now because I'm
00:24going to go to the Properties panel and just make it exactly 90 pixels by 90
00:29pixels and hit the Enter key.
00:31That way I know that it's exactly the shape that I want.
00:33So you can move an object by just clicking and dragging on it with either the
00:37Selection tool or the Sub-selection tool.
00:39The Sub-selection tool lets you edit the corners of an object.
00:43Try to edit the corner of a rectangle.
00:45It's always going to give you this dialog box because a rectangle needs to
00:48turned into a Vector Shape.
00:50So I'll hit OK, which will lose the corners option underneath the shape of the
00:55object, but we'll be able to reshape this object now how we want.
00:59So if you click and drag an object, you can move it around the stage. If you hold
01:02down the Shift key, you'll only be able to move that object in 45-degree angles.
01:07So I can move this around 45-degree angles.
01:11You can also move an object by using the Arrow Keys, so if I tap on the arrow to
01:14the right, it's going to move it one pixel to the right.
01:17If I tap on the Arrow Up it will move it one pixel up and to the left and to the bottom.
01:21If I hold down the Shift key when I do that it moves, it in 10 pixels increments,
01:25so sometimes you want to get somewhere a little bit quicker than pixel by pixel,
01:29so adding the Shift key to the Arrows moves it little faster.
01:32Of course, we already saw how in the Properties Inspector we can reshape
01:36things to a specific size.
01:38We can also position them to a specific X and Y position by typing in a value right here.
01:44Whenever you want to make a copy of an object, you can go to the Edit menu and
01:47select Duplicate and that makes a copy of an object, 10 pixels to the right and
01:5310 pixels down from its previous position, so you could that and move it over to
01:57the side if you want to.
01:59Nice to have Smart Guides on, so if you don't have them already, go to the View
02:03menu and under Smart Guides, make sure those are on.
02:06I also like to have this tool Tips option on because as I am moving it, it's
02:09going to tell me an X and Y position right underneath the pointer, and as I am
02:14drawing or resizing, it's going to show me the dimensions of the of the object
02:18I'm drawing right underneath.
02:19So those are really useful to have whenever you're doing anything. They can be a
02:23little obnoxious if you're really trying to do precise work, so you can turn them on and off.
02:28Another option is to go to the Edit menu and select Clone.
02:31If you do that, the object will be placed right on top of the other object.
02:35If we look at the layers palette, you can see that we've got another copy
02:38of this object, so we can move that to the right if we want to and let go right here.
02:43You can also make a clone of an object by holding down the Option key while
02:48you're dragging the original, and that makes a copy of that object as well.
02:52So if I can keep on doing that, holding down the Option key, I can drag myself
02:56some additional copies of those objects.
02:58And then I can select all of them with this tool, drag myself a selection
03:02rectangle, hold down the Option key and click and drag down to make myself a
03:06little grid of images.
03:07Now this is when the Alignment Tools become really handy. Sometimes Fireworks
03:12has a hard time kind of aligning things perfectly so you can use the Alignment
03:17Tools to bring these things in by spacing them a certain width from each other.
03:21I'll turn this Relative to Canvas off.
03:23I'm going to put 15 pixels--that's what this means right here--in between the
03:26objects and make sure that these are aligned properly, and I'll just delete
03:30these because I know these are perfect.
03:32I'll select this, and then I'll group it, and then I'll Option-click and Drag to
03:38make a copy right here.
03:39And whenever I want to make another duplicate of an object with the same
03:44offset as the previous object, I can hit the Command+Y button, and that does a
03:50transformation that's exactly like the last transformation that I have just done.
03:54So if I keep on clicking Command+Y, or Ctrl+Y on a PC, it's going to keep
03:58on making copies of this group of three objects at the same offset as I had previously.
04:03So let me Undo one.
04:05So now that I have three groups of three objects, I can select them and make
04:10sure that I space them 15 pixels evenly, and now I have an object that's exactly
04:15the size that I need.
04:18Now this looks pretty good. I am noticing just a little bit of a problem.
04:21It looks like something is not right here because this should be 300 pixels by
04:26300 pixels, instead they are 302x303. That means that some of these objects
04:31aren't quite aligning perfectly.
04:33So I'm going to ungroup this right here, and I'm just going to click on these
04:37objects, make sure that they are Aligned to the top.
04:40Take a look right here.
04:41You can see that it says 300x91. These should be 300x90.
04:46You make sure that they are aligned to the top edge.
04:49Okay, so now they are perfectly aligned.
04:51So this is a good place to go when you're trying to make something perfect.
04:54It's 300x90, so it looks like one of these objects was offset just a little bit
04:59when I duplicated it.
05:00So I'll just go ahead and delete these other ones and then select these again.
05:05So I'm going to do Command+G. When I group them I see that they are exactly
05:09300x90, and then I'll Option-click and drag.
05:12So on holding down the Option key, you can add the Shift key if you want to make
05:15sure you constrain them to straight line movement here.
05:19And then I will let go, and then I'll hit Command+Y again, makes another
05:24copy and just to make sure, select all these, 15 pixels in between, click on this right here.
05:30It looks like I had it just perfectly, and I can tell down here that the Width
05:33and Height of all the objects together is 300x300 pixels.
05:37So now I know that this particular grid is perfectly aligned and perfectly
05:41spaced evenly by using a lot of these tools like Movement and the Alignment panel.
05:47By far my favorite way to clone is Option-dragging on objects.
05:51I usually use the Transform Again Command, which is Command+Y or Ctrl+Y on a PC,
05:56and I definitely do this in conjunction with the Alignment Panels often when I'm
05:59doing these kind of grids just to quickly make sure that everything is
06:02perfectly matched and perfectly aligned.
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Reshaping with the Path panel
00:01So, Fireworks has an excellent panel that is the 800-pound gorilla of path, and
00:05object management and it's called the Path panel.
00:08It's full of options for modifying your shapes, so let's check them out.
00:11If you don't already have the Path panel up, go to the Window menu and go
00:14towards the bottom of the screen and look for the Path panel right here.
00:19So you can see the Path panel is divided into Combine Paths, Alter Paths,
00:23Edit Points, and Select Points.
00:25You're probably going to use Combine Paths the most.
00:27Combine Paths is just a way of taking two different shapes and making them into
00:32maybe a single shape or finding different relationships between the two shapes.
00:37So I have these two buildings as separate shapes.
00:39If I click on Union Paths, it's going to make it just into one single shape.
00:43Of course, now, my windows are gone.
00:46They're really just behind this building.
00:48So, what I'm going to do to get them back is I'll click on this group right
00:51here, and I'll hold down the Shift key and click on the group of buildings back
00:55here and then click on the background.
00:58I'm still holding down the Shift key, and then I'll just right-click and select
01:01a range, send everything to the back.
01:04that way my lights will now be at the topmost layer.
01:07That's kind of cool because sometimes-- let me undo that a few times. Sometimes
01:10you get this little kind of white line in between two elements.
01:15So by combining them, you kind of make them all into one shape.
01:18I'm going to redo this.
01:19So I am holding down Command+Shift+C, that redoes, normally undo, and Command+Y
01:27or Command+Shift+C will also work.
01:29It's Ctrl+Shift+Z on a PC. So, combining things is really good.
01:34Another way that you can fix that issue with this little line--I know that these
01:38shapes are perfectly on top of each other, it's just that the positioning of
01:41this particular shape on the workspace is so that you get this kind of edge
01:47that's not purely straight.
01:48So you could do a couple of things.
01:51I'm zooming out. So you can try to make the fills instead of Anti-Alias, Hard fills.
01:58In this particular shape, that's going to work really well, but you're still
02:01getting the bad edge maybe from this shape right here.
02:05So what you could do in some instances is click on a shape and go to the Modify
02:08menu and select Snap to Pixel.
02:10That will move the shape ove--and I think it did so in this case. It moved the
02:15shape over a little bit so that the edge of this shape is exactly at the end of that pixel.
02:20So, I can click on this one and go to the Modify menu and select Snap to Pixel,
02:24and you'll see that it will move to a perfect pixel position.
02:29You can just keep on doing that with your shapes until they're all perfectly aligned.
02:34So Modify > Snap to Pixel, and it just scoots it over a little bit.
02:38Here now it's leaving even a bigger gap, so I'm going to click on this, and
02:41maybe just use my right-arrow to scoot it over one pixel to the right.
02:45Now it's looking pretty good.
02:47But perhaps on this side, I need to move it over.
02:50So even though you might think your shapes are perfectly positioned, sometimes
02:54you have to kind of move everything manually, and it might just be easier to
02:58combine all these shapes with the Path tool as one shape.
03:01So I selected this group of shapes here, and I have the Sub-selection tool.
03:06I'm going to click right on this point right there and the point down here,
03:11and then I am just going to hit the left-arrow to move that over a pixel and
03:15that looks a lot better.
03:18But sometimes, if you don't want to mess with that, just combine all the shapes
03:19as a single shape, so I can grab all of these elements that are buildings and
03:23just come over here and Combine Paths, hit Union Paths, and it mix it all into
03:29a single shape which is kind of nice.
03:31It looks like maybe here, my shapes weren't on top of each other.
03:34So let me undo that and what I'll do then is I'll click on this one,
03:39Sub-selection tool, click on these points, Shift-click on that one, maybe right
03:45there, the left-arrow, just so that I know that they're overlapping now.
03:49So I can click, Shift-click, Shift-click on all these other buildings, and then
03:55I can hit Union Path, and now that's one shape.
03:59I can see that there is no little holes anywhere, and then I'm going to
04:03Shift-click on this group of buildings back here and this background,
04:07right-click, Arrange > Send to Back, and now we have one nice shape that we
04:13don't have to worry about the edges and everything is looking good.
04:16So you can do other things here.
04:17One of the ones you might look in to is punching a path,
04:20so making a hole on one path with another path.
04:23It creates a compound shape.
04:25So if you hit this Punch Paths, now you're making this shape with a hole of this
04:30little square right here.
04:31So those are the two shapes that I had selected. Let me zoom in so you could see it better.
04:35So I have this entire building group, and I have one of these rectangles chosen.
04:40So if I go to Punch Paths, it's going to make a hole with this rectangle on
04:44to the bigger shape.
04:46So let's see, Punch Paths right there and now this is actually a see-through shape.
04:51So let me move it around, so you could see what's happening.
04:53So I should be able to see through this back building.
04:57So that window is actually see-through now. And that's sometimes what you want.
05:00There's a lot of different ways you can work with paths.
05:03So let me just draw a couple of paths here.
05:05So I'll draw this path and I'll make myself a circle or an ellipse, and I'll
05:11call that a different color and I'll select both of them, and we can just kind
05:15of go through some of these.
05:17It's going to join the paths, but look it actually created a couple of different
05:20shapes out of those two paths.
05:23Let me see if I can select.
05:25So it actually just split the paths, joined them together.
05:29There are still two different paths, it's just that they're joined together and
05:32the intersection becomes a little hole, a little punch-through hole that you can see through.
05:37This next tool right here will actually take those two paths, and split them
05:41back apart so that they're two paths again. It colored them all the same color, but at
05:45least it allowed me to get to the individual shapes again.
05:48So, let me make this red again and try some of these other ones.
05:55Of course, you've already seen Union Path, it just combines the two paths and
05:58makes them into a single shape, and then there is the Intersect Paths which
06:02gives you the intersection of these two paths.
06:05I already showed you Punch. And then Divide Paths gives you a couple of little
06:09paths out of the one path that you had.
06:13Exclude Paths is going to pretty much do the same thing.
06:15Really, a lot of times this depends on the two shapes that are overlapping and
06:19what they're doing at the moment.
06:21So sometimes, some of these look like they do the same thing but they're not
06:24really doing exactly the same thing.
06:26So play around with them, the Punch is probably one of the most useful, the
06:31Union is probably also the next most useful, and in addition to that, there's
06:35all these other options for altering a path.
06:37So, you could see that we can, for example, try to simplify paths.
06:41Now, if I simplify any of these shapes, I am not going to really do that much.
06:44So I'm going to go to the Vector Drawing tool here, to the Vector Path tool
06:48underneath the Pen tool, and I'm going to draw a shape because this really does
06:51create a lot of points when you draw with this.
06:54So I'll make it thicker so you could see it better, and let me go a little
06:59slower, because the slower you go, the more points it adds.
07:03So let me draw some sort of shape right there, sort of slow so that adds a lot of points.
07:08There you go!
07:09So with these tools, you can change the way the paths are drawn.
07:13This particular point is useful, especially for when you draw things with this
07:17shape or use any of these tools.
07:19These tools right here, the reshaping tools, really add a lot of points.
07:23So if I do this to any one of these shapes, sometimes it adds a lot of points,
07:29so I guess not really doing it right now of course.
07:30Let's see. We'll use the Redraw Path tool. Now I know that one sure adds a ton of points.
07:37So I will kind of reshape this path here, and you can see that we've got a
07:41bazillion points when we try to reshape that area right there.
07:44So what I'll do is I'll click on this right here to simplify this path, and bam!
07:48You see how it just gave me a lot less points there, and I can control the
07:53amount of simplification it's doing with this slider here, so a lot or just a little.
07:59The path does changes sometimes dramatically when you simplify things a lot,
08:04but I know that when you draw with this tool and you try to reshape it, it does
08:07create so many points that sometimes you just want to be able to create a simpler shape.
08:12Another really useful one is Convert Strokes to Fills.
08:15So if I click on this, it's actually going to outline my stroke which can be
08:20useful sometimes when you're working with strokes, and you want to make them
08:24fills because maybe you want to add some sort of gradient or something that's
08:27not available to strokes, some patterning or some of kind of effect that you
08:31can't apply to strokes.
08:32Sometimes this is a great way of getting the actual shape of the stroke without
08:36having to have a line there.
08:37So those are quite useful.
08:39A lot of other ones right here. There's a really cool Extrude Paths.
08:43So let's try that one out with this circle.
08:45We'll hit this Extrude Paths, and this is one that you really want to have an
08:51outline to your shape because you could see that it's a 3D extrusion of your
08:55original, but you can't really see it very well until you add yourself a color
09:01here, and sometimes it resets as you're modifying it.
09:04So you could see that we can add some taper to this.
09:11You could pretty much see what each one of these options do.
09:14This is a really cool way of getting some 3D shapes really quickly with Fireworks.
09:21So, the Edit Points I find a little less useful.
09:24It allows you to choose points or modify points.
09:27I like this tool right here, sometimes. It's called Fillet Points.
09:30What it does is it rounds the edges.
09:33Some of these tools in the Path panel are almost a little experimental.
09:38They don't exactly have an interface, that's because Flash has a really cool
09:43API for creating these.
09:45You can create all kinds of things in Flash, and add panels to Flash yourself if
09:50you understand the API.
09:51But sometimes some of these tools won't get an awesome interface.
09:55So this allows you to convert a corner to a rounded edge by just typing in
10:00a number right there.
10:01You could see that it did it right here.
10:04The shape now has rounded edges instead of straight edges that it used to have before.
10:09So there it is, I undid, and let me do that again.
10:14So I've got this, there it is, straight and I'll click on it again and I'll
10:20go back to the Fillet.
10:21I'm not exactly sure why, there must be a fishing thing why they call it Fillet.
10:26So I'll click on 5 corner radius, hit it, wait a minute, and there it goes!
10:31It rounded the edges.
10:32That can be really useful, although it doesn't have a great interface, sometimes
10:36Fireworks updates the interfaces of these, so I know that a couple of these
10:40tools were changed in the last version to have better interfaces.
10:44So I look forward to some of these being added.
10:46And sometimes you'll see that Flash has some tools like these tools right here
10:53that are just for selecting different points of objects.
10:57So you could see that as I click, I can click on--just select the bottom points
11:01or just select the top points of the shape.
11:03Now, it's selecting the top points.
11:05I'm not sure that's horribly useful.
11:07Something good to play around with, but I don't think anything that you're going
11:10to be using all the time.
11:11A lot of these are pretty cool.
11:13I would definitely recommend playing around with some of these.
11:16They are really, really cool sort of experiments--nothing that you use all the time.
11:21You will love the Combine Paths. Altering Paths can be useful.
11:26The Extrude is to me really cool, because sometimes I do want to get a 3D
11:29shape very quickly.
11:31Some of these End Points are things that you're going to play around with but
11:34maybe never use, and the Select Points, I'm not sure that I would ever use those myself.
11:39Some of these options are also available in the Modify menu under Modify.
11:45So under Combine Paths, you can choose to Join, Split, Union.
11:49Some of these even have shortcuts.
11:51Joining things is something you do super commonly, so you can try to join and
11:54split shapes together, and there are a few of them right here, I find that using
11:58the Path panel is actually a better way because you have a visual way to see
12:03what the shape is going to do when you click on some of these shapes.
12:05So, I love the Path panel, use some of it a lot, some of it very little, but all
12:11that is really, really interesting stuff to work with paths.
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Masking objects
00:00Fireworks has a lot of different ways that you can make Masks.
00:04Masks allow you to temporarily hide objects with shapes or vectors.
00:08And in a vector mask, a vector object-like circle or square or any other shape
00:14cookie-cutters another object or photo.
00:16So, we're going to use a circle right now to create a simple vector mask.
00:20So I've chosen the Ellipse tool, and I'm going to drag a circle.
00:24By holding down the Shift key, I constrain the shape so that it's perfect circle.
00:28Once I got that shape, I can position it where I want to cut the object.
00:32I'm going to go to the Edit menu, select Cut, click on my object that I want to
00:39cookie-cutter and then go back to Edit, select Paste as Mask.
00:42So you can see that my object is now in the shape of this circle and the rest of
00:49the background is now transparent.
00:50As soon as you create a vector shape like this or a vector mask like this, you
00:55can see that there are a few options in the Properties palette.
00:58So one of them is to either mask with the path outline or the grayscale value of
01:04whatever shape I use to create the mask.
01:05So if I click on this, you'll see that this photo is now very transparent
01:10because it had a very dark color.
01:12If I switch to something that's lighter, I can see more of the object.
01:15So it's still a little transparent, but I can see more of the object through
01:19depending on the color.
01:20Of course, I can use a gradient and with a gradient, let's go from white to black.
01:25You can see that it's using that Grayscale value here.
01:27With a gradient, I can of course pick on these edges and move them around,
01:32change the angle and the direction of the gradients and move this thing around
01:35to really control my transparency with a lot of detail.
01:40Once you double-click or you click somewhere else, you deselect this Mask.
01:45To get the Mask shape back, you can do a couple of things, because if I click
01:49right now, it's going to select this object that is the original bitmap with the Mask in it.
01:54So if I click on the Sub-selection tool and I click on this edge of this image,
02:00then I'll click just on the Vector Shape and I have all my options back.
02:04The other way that you can get to these is by going to the layers menu.
02:07You can see that there are two different sort of images here,
02:11so previews for this layer.
02:12If I click on this one, I'll be selecting the Bitmap and I have some
02:16Bitmap options here.
02:17If I click on this one, I can select just the vector mask, and I can mess around
02:22with the properties of that.
02:23So I can feather my Mask if I want to, just go to Feather here, and just apply
02:28amount of Feather that just gives it a soft edge.
02:30You can see it more at the very top of the photo, just a little soft blend
02:34into the background.
02:36Go back to Anti-Alias here.
02:40If I want to move the photo inside the Mask, that's a little bit tricky.
02:43But if you click on this Pointer tool and just click on the Bitmap itself,
02:47there's a little registration point that appears right here, and if you're very
02:51careful and you click that, you can move the shape inside the Mask.
02:55Notice that sometimes that doesn't work perfectly.
02:57A lot of times like you'll try to click on this point, and you'll move the whole
03:00thing just like that.
03:01Sometimes you just have to be persistent and a little bit patient, and
03:05hopefully, you'll be able to click and move that Mask around.
03:08Go back to my Mask options, click on this outline.
03:13If you're masking only by the Path Outline, I'll click on that, you can show the
03:17original Fill and Stroke like this of this object.
03:21So, I've been showing a little bit of that gray gradient that I have going on right now.
03:24If I choose to just outline with the path and then show the Fill and Stroke.
03:29So, a lot of different options here.
03:33If you go to the Layers panel, you can also turn this link off right here.
03:37This link allows you to move the shape separately.
03:39So if I click this link off and I click on this Bitmap part, then I should be
03:45able to move just the Bitmap without moving the vector mask, and if I click on this right here--oops!
03:51I turned the link back on, I have to click on this.
03:53You could see the blue there, a little green outline on the Mask, and the blue outline on the Bitmap.
03:57So if I click on that, I should be able to more easily move just the
04:01Vector Shape around.
04:02Also, I can use any of the Transformation Tools to transform my vector mask, so
04:07I can make my Mask smaller and position it wherever I want, as soon as I have
04:12only this selected right here.
04:15But they're usually links, so I'm going to click on the link, and now when I
04:19click on, click off somewhere to deselect, click on this object, they're
04:22going to move together.
04:23If I want to get rid of a Mask, all I have to do is just drag the Mask, a little
04:29preview here on to the Trash and it's going to say, do you want to apply the
04:33mask before removing?
04:35I don't want to apply the Mask.
04:36I'm going to hit Discard, and that gets me back to my original Bitmap object.
04:40There's another way of creating a Mask.
04:42It's sort of the reverse of this one.
04:44So I'll draw my shape, but this time I'm going to click on this object on the
04:47Bitmap itself, and I'm going to go to the Edit menu, select Cut, click on my
04:53shape and go to the Edit menu and select Paste Inside.
04:56This is kind of the reverse, you're pasting the Bitmap into the shape.
05:00It doesn't have to be Bitmaps, it can be a complex group of elements, it can be
05:04any sort of group of elements--vector elements or bitmap elements--and you can
05:09paste them inside other objects.
05:10So it really doesn't matter which way you go, either way is fine.
05:14Sometimes you'll find that one will be better than the other.
05:17You can still click on this Bitmap and get to all these vector mask Options
05:21right on the Properties panel.
05:22Okay, so I'm going to delete this, and I'll show you--I'll discard this--and
05:28I'll show you how to do text.
05:29You can actually use text as Masks as well.
05:31So click right here, this guy's name is Barot.
05:37Move this to where I want it, and I'll grab just his eyes, select.
05:41Well, I'll go ahead and cut it, click on the Bitmap, Edit > Paste as Mask, and
05:47now I've got that shape of the text masking the element.
05:52If you click on the Text tool, and you click on the text itself, you are still
05:56going to be able to use some of the Text Tools.
05:59Sometimes, you'll not be able to see say the font size and all that stuff, but I
06:03can still hold on the Command key and hit the left-arrow to control my tracking,
06:08and my kerning, the spacing between the letters.
06:12So, I probably want this text to be a little darker.
06:17Actually, I need to click on grayscale first and make sure I paint with--
06:22The text is super opaque. So pretty cool.
06:26You can use text just as well as you can use any other kind of shape and the
06:30text still remains editable.
06:31So, maybe I change his name to Byrot, or put back to Barot.
06:37So you can also have Bitmap Masks.
06:40Let me go ahead and delete this mask and select Discard again, and I can grab an
06:48element and actually add a mask by hitting this button right here.
06:52So I'll add the mask, and this is a Bitmap Mask, which means you can use the
06:55Bitmap Painting Tools and start painting on your image.
06:58I'll make my brush a lot bigger.
07:01Then I can start painting transparency much like you can do in Photoshop.
07:04You can paint some transparency, and that way you can kind of get rid of maybe
07:08the edge of the shirt to give him a better sort of knock out, shaped as
07:13background, so I am going to make it a lot bigger.
07:15This is going to take me forever if I do it like this. So there you go!
07:19You can really kind of work around his hair.
07:22So I'm painting right now.
07:23You can see the shape appear right here.
07:25I'm painting with black.
07:27If I paint with white, I will show more of his photo back again.
07:30So if you screw up, you can go paint back whatever you deleted with white.
07:33So if you're familiar with the way Photoshop Masks work, these are exactly the same thing.
07:38Of course, you can use the Selection tool.
07:41So you make a shape and then, so actually let me go ahead and delete this shape.
07:47So if you have the Selection Tools on, then you can use Option+Delete instead of Option+Command.
07:52So if you have your Fill as white, you can hit black, and then Option+Delete and
07:58that deletes the shape.
07:59So any of these freeform Vector Tools will also cut out a shape depending on
08:03which color you have selected under the Fill.
08:05Let me delete this mask one more time.
08:09If you do have one of these Selection Tools, I want to make sure I click on the photo first.
08:15Click on the photo, and then I have one of these Selection Tools like this,
08:19then I can actually click on this Mask tool and it will use that shape to create the mask.
08:25That's a quick shortcut if you want to create the mask with a specific Selection tool.
08:29Make sure you've got the object selected and then draw your Bitmap selection and
08:34then click on this Mask icon under the layers.
08:37Out of the two types of Masks, the Bitmap versus the Vector Masks, I really
08:42love the Vector Masks better because they're much more adjustable, so therefore more flexible.
08:48So you'll see me oftentimes just use a shape, even if it's a rectangle and
08:54adjust the Masks via gradients and some of the grayscale transparency that you
08:59get when working with Masks.
09:01So Masking is a really common and important step to develop an artwork, and
09:05you can see that Fireworks does give you, like, a full range of tools to dealing with Masks.
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Animating objects with states
00:00The web is in a transitionary period where animations are moving away from Flash
00:05into HTML5 through software like Adobe Edge.
00:08Fireworks does let you create some basic animations, and they can be exported as animated GIFs.
00:14So let's take a look at how we can do simple animations in Fireworks.
00:17So you do basic animations through States.
00:20I'm going to create a new document.
00:22I'll just click on this right here and do a 1000 pixel by say 500 pixels
00:28high and hit Enter.
00:29Then I am going to come over here and draw myself a little star shape.
00:34So if you don't see the star shape, you can click and hold down the mouse button
00:37until you get to the star shape right here at the bottom, and I'm going to drag
00:40myself just a nice little star there.
00:42So, to animate this object, I need to see the States panel.
00:48If you don't see that, go to the Window menu and select States. It's right here.
00:51It might also be next to your layers and your Pages. So look in there.
00:55So to create an animation, what we do is we add another State, we can go back to
01:00the State 1 and copy this object,
01:02so Edit > Copy, and go back to State 2 and paste, scoot it over, and now we have
01:09a little animation between these two States.
01:11In the second State, we've moved that object over just a little bit.
01:15We can preview animations right here at the bottom of the Workspace.
01:19So I hit the Play button, and it's just going to play through those animations.
01:22Let me add a few more.
01:24So when I add another one, I can go ahead and create a new State, but it's
01:27easier to actually just drag this into the new State Icon down here.
01:32It makes a copy in the same position, so now I can move that over, and I'll drag
01:38me another copy here.
01:40I can move that over some more, and now I can play it.
01:44See how it's working.
01:45Looking pretty good.
01:46Now, it might be useful to turn on Skinning.
01:49So Skinning, you can turn it on right here, or you can just use this left-hand side.
01:54So, if I click over here, you can see that I can see now the State.
01:58I'm in State 1 and I can see States 2 and 3.
02:00If I click on State 2, and that one is a little darker, and I can move this
02:06thing up and show different states.
02:08So now it's showing State before and the State after.
02:11There are also some shortcuts right here, so you could say just show me the
02:14current State and the next State or show me the before and after States right
02:19there, or show all of them.
02:22This is kind of cool, Multi-State Editing.
02:24If you turn that on, then you can not only affect the editing of the
02:28current State, but you can also edit any States that are shown through the Onion Skinning.
02:31So I can maybe give this thing a little bit of a curve by adjusting the position
02:35of these three states, and then I'll go to State 4 and then maybe I'll move it
02:41down here, maybe I'll show all the states to see how everything is flowing.
02:45So maybe I can be slower at the beginning and faster at the end.
02:49So let me go ahead and preview that.
02:54On the right-hand side, I can also adjust the timing for each one of those states.
02:59So if I double-click on this state right here and I'll type in 100.
03:03So 100/100th of a second is going to be 1 second.
03:06So I'm going to hit Enter, and now that animation will stop at the last
03:10frame for a second.
03:11If you want to, you can affect a bunch of different states by Shift-clicking on
03:20one, and then the other one, that selects a range, and then you can double-click
03:26right here, and then modify the number and hit Enter.
03:30And that modifies all of them, all the states at the same time.
03:33So the timing for everyone with the states now is 20.
03:35If I hit Play, you'll see the animation will play slower.
03:42To delete a State, you just drag it to the Trashcan, and that gets rid of that State.
03:47From the Looping menu, you can also control whether the object loops forever--
03:51which is the default--or just loops for a few number of times.
03:55So this has to do with when you export the object.
03:57You're going to have to export this is a GIF animation because it's the only of
04:01the main graphic format that supports animated keyframes like this and so you
04:06can have the animation play just a certain amount of times, but Forever works
04:11for us, so we'll just keep it on Forever.
04:13There's also a shortcut for creating animation.
04:15So I'm going to get rid of these other two states.
04:17Click on the first one, Shift-click on this other one and hit the Delete key
04:21here, and that leaves me with just my original State.
04:23So if you go to the Menus, you can go to Modify > Animation and select Animate Selection.
04:30So from here you can create some States automatically and add a little bit of animation.
04:34So I'm going to add 10 States to my animation.
04:36I'm going to move them a total of say 900 pixels, and the direction is whether
04:43you're going to the right or to the left or any angle.
04:46So direction 0 will move it to the right, 180 to the left, and you can use this
04:51little pop-up here to control that, but I just want to move it to the right.
04:54So I'll keep it at 0.
04:55I can also scale them, change the opacity so that they are less opaque at the beginning.
05:00So maybe you can do an animation that starts off, kind of fade it out, and
05:04ends up being 100% opaque, and then the rotation, you can have the object rotate as well.
05:09So I'm going to rotate this 360 degrees clockwise, and I'm going to hit OK.
05:15And Fireworks is going to tell me that it needs to add a few States in order to
05:18build the animation. I'll hit OK.
05:21And now, when I go through the States, you can see the animation is
05:24working pretty well.
05:25You go ahead and turn Onion Skinning off and now go back to State 1.
05:32Let me preview the animation.
05:37I'll adjust the timing a little bit, double-click on this last one, keep it to--
05:41let's see, we'll make it hold for a second here, and we'll adjust the timing of
05:46all these other ones.
05:48So click on the first one, Shift-click on the last one, double-click anywhere,
05:52right here, and then type in--I'll put in 7/100ths of a second, and let's preview it now.
06:01Now, when you go to State 1, and you click on this, you'll see these keyframes
06:05up here right there.
06:06You can actually redirect what type those frames are and also the position of
06:12these frames by moving this dot around.
06:14So let's play this here, and you can see that moving in a different direction. Pretty cool!
06:23Although GIF animations are a little rare today as the world moves to tools
06:26like Adobe Edge and HTML5, Fireworks does provide some good tools for dealing
06:31with simple animations.
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Using the 9-Slice Scaling tool
00:00Fireworks has a really neat tool that lets you rescale objects without
00:04distorting their edges.
00:05It's called the 9-Slice Scaling tool.
00:08So let's take a look at it and see how we can use it on a project.
00:11So here, I have a button that I want to use to mock up a form element, and I
00:17don't want to use the word OK here, I want to use a different word.
00:20So I'm going to modify this button and scale it to maybe fit something larger
00:25where OK is right now.
00:26So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to choose the Magic Wand tool, and I
00:31want to get rid of this slight border that I have here, this light gray border.
00:35So I'm going to click on that and it did a nice job of selecting everything.
00:39If you have a problem with it, you can increase or decrease the Tolerance.
00:42That will kind of choose more or less of the color that you picked on.
00:46So let me reduce that down.
00:48That looks pretty good.
00:49So now that I've got that selection done, I'm going to hit the Delete key.
00:52That gets rid of that outline.
00:54Then the next thing that I want to do is I want to get rid of the word OK here.
00:57So first, I'm going to click on this button, and then I'm going to use
01:01this Marquee Selection to select an area inside that button just next of
01:07the OK button here.
01:09Once I got that done, click and drag while holding the Command key down, and the Option key.
01:14That creates a copy of the original that I clicked on.
01:18So there I go, and that gets rid of the OK text.
01:22So now I have a nice button.
01:24If I want to make this button larger or smaller, let me go back to the Scale tool here.
01:29If I scale this normally, you'll see that it will distort the edges,
01:33doesn't look too bad there.
01:34Let's go the other way.
01:36So we'll distort the edges right here of this particular shape.
01:41Not very good, that's not what I want.
01:43I would like to scale it, but protecting these edges so that's exactly what this
01:47tool is for is underneath the Scale tool--and there it is, it's called the
01:519-Slice Scaling tool.
01:54So once you activate the 9-Slice Scaling tool, you can click on these
01:58guides that it gives you and drag the guides over to the areas that you want to protect.
02:02So I'm protecting these corners right here,
02:05this corner, this corner, and this corner. And now, as I scale, it's going to
02:10scale everything else, but it's going to leave the corners along.
02:13So I'll double-click to apply it, and you can see that I get a much nicer edge
02:16on this particular button all the way around.
02:19So now I can really mock up a humongous button on top of this, and this font
02:24size is really huge.
02:25So, let me make it smaller;
02:27maybe a little smaller.
02:31Now, this works for not just Bitmap shapes, but it also works for vector shapes.
02:38So let me show you an example of that.
02:40Say that I have a beveled rectangle--not a beveled, let's do a rounded rectangle.
02:46I want to do like a little sort of shape of somebody kind of saying something.
02:51So, I'm going to use this tool to create the object that I want to use.
02:56If I click on these little pointers on the edge, I'm holding down the
02:59Command key, I'm going to click on this to make my rounded edges a little more pronounced.
03:04What I want to do now is I want to add a little bit of a bubble kind of curve right here.
03:09So, to do that, I'm going to have to ungroup this object because it's a rounded rectangle,
03:13so I will right-click in here and select Ungroup.
03:16Now, this is a vector shape.
03:18We can work with the Pen tool to add a couple of points here.
03:22So, I've got the Pen tool close to the object, you can see that little Plus sign right there.
03:26So I'm going to click here, and then click again right next to it, click one
03:30more time to make three points, hold down the Command key, switch over to this
03:35pointer, and then click on this point, drag it out, and then I'm going to hold
03:39down the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click and drag handle out of
03:47this Corner tool, and then do the same thing right here;
03:49click and drag myself a handle.
03:51I will get both of them.
03:52I let go of the Option key, hold down the Shift key here to make sure this is straight.
03:58Then come over here, hold down the Command key and Option key to make sure that I can change the
04:06direction of this shape right there, this Bezier Curve.
04:09So now I have a nice little sort of bubble and let me color it something other
04:13than black here and I'll color it maybe light blue.
04:18I'll go ahead and give it an edge.
04:19That's a little bit darker blue right there.
04:23So that's looking pretty good.
04:24But I'm going to have the same problem I did with this button if I try to scale it.
04:29So if I click on the normal Scaling tool, and if I scale this horizontally, I'll
04:35get some of that distortion because Fireworks no longer understands that these
04:39corners have to be mathematically shaped properly.
04:42So I'll undo, just simply go to the 9- Slice Scaling tool and protect the corners
04:48that I need to protect.
04:49So I'm going to come up here and there.
04:55So right after these curves, I'm going to move my slice guides there.
05:00Now, if I make this a lot wider, it protects these edges, so I get a much nicer shape.
05:06Now, this is not perfect, but I can live with that.
05:08These corners will be a real pain to do.
05:10So all I have to do is just come over here, and reposition this.
05:14So you can see the 9-Slice Scaling tool is a really, really handy tool,
05:20especially when you have these kind of shapes that need to be resized in a
05:23specific way without distorting the edges.
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5. Organizing Documents
Working with layers
00:00Layers are a great way of organizing your document, and they support a lot of
00:04functionality that can make your life easier.
00:07Let's take a look at layers in Fireworks.
00:09So every object you have on the stage goes into a layer.
00:12If I click on one of these objects, you see in the Layers panel, the
00:16object becomes activated.
00:17If you don't have the Layers panel open, just go to the Window menu, and
00:21select layers right here.
00:23It's part of this layers, States, Pages group, so you might just find it to the
00:27right underneath one of these tabs.
00:29We can turn layers on and off by clicking on this Eye icon on the left side of
00:34each layer, and right next to it, we can also lock a layer, so we can prevent
00:38people from grabbing our element.
00:40So, this right here, let me click back on that rectangle. There you go!
00:50So if I lock it, I can no longer click on that.
00:52I'm clicking on this background element which is right there.
00:55So I can lock any one of these layers that I can to prevent me from clicking
00:58and dragging objects.
00:59To unlock them, just click right back here again, and let me scroll back up, and
01:05I'll unlock this object right here just as Roux Academy logo.
01:09You can rename an object, so it's a little bit difficult to tell that this is the logo.
01:14So if I double-click on this name part right here, I can rename that logo, and
01:18that makes it a little bit easier for me to tell what it's supposed to be.
01:21To delete a layer, you can just drag it to the Trash and let go, and that
01:25deletes the entire layer.
01:26I'm going to undo to make sure I get that back.
01:28So I'll go to the Edit menu and select Undo Delete, so I don't want to delete the logo.
01:33Now, some of these things are better organized in layer folders, so you could see
01:36that there's already a folder called layer 1 here, but it would be nice to be
01:40able to group things into folders.
01:41So, to add a Folder, I can add a New/Duplicate layer.
01:46So, in Fireworks, folders are technically layers, so even though you have layers
01:51for each element, you can also have a layer that looks like a folder, but it's
01:55called the layer down here.
01:56So once you have another layer, we can move an element into that layer group.
02:01So if I click and drag this logo, and I put it right there, it's now going to be
02:05underneath this layer too.
02:07So this is kind of the text part of the logo, it's down here.
02:10So I move that also into this folder and it will put it right on top of my logo.
02:15So now, I can hit this triangle to collapse this layer and turn that on and off.
02:21So I might rename this thing like Header.
02:25So to rename, just double-click and type in whatever name you want, and now I can
02:29move all the items that belong to the header into that header part.
02:32So I'll click on this, Shift-click on this text, and maybe this black box as well.
02:38Shift-click on that. And I want to move them all into this Header folder.
02:43Now, there's a couple of ways that I can do that.
02:45I showed you how I can click and drag to move some of these layers over.
02:48I'm going to expand this Layers panel by clicking and dragging on this edge.
02:52So you could see another way of doing it.
02:54Whenever I choose objects on any layer or a layer folder, I'll get this little
02:59icon right here that shows that this is the layer that I'm working with.
03:03I actually click and drag on this into another layer and put those elements on that new layer.
03:09Now, the elements by default, if you just put them on top of the folder, they
03:12appear at the top of this layer group.
03:15So I can also just use the Layers panel to move these three objects underneath,
03:19some of these other objects, and move them down a few levels.
03:23Let's see how my header area is looking now. That looks pretty good.
03:28So we've got a header, we've got a main section here.
03:30Let's create another layer folder, and we'll call this one, of course, Footer, and
03:34let's rename this one Main.
03:38So I don't have anything on my Footer.
03:40I'm going to put in the Main section in between the Header and the Footer.
03:43So you've got to be careful that you don't put that on top of a folder.
03:47So just wait until you see that little double line right there, let go, and then
03:50it moves right there.
03:51So let me go to my Footer part down here, and I'll start just grabbing items
03:57from my footer, because this right here is actually also a background, I'm going
04:01to go to Select menu and then choose Deselect.
04:04That way I have nothing selected and I'm going to click on this background,
04:08hold down the Shift key, click on this element, click on this, click on this.
04:12I'm going to hold down the spacebar, so I can get this Hand tool, and drag
04:17around, and then again, let go of the spacebar, hold down the Shift key,
04:21click, click, click, choose these three elements, and I can move them just by
04:27clicking on this little circle down to the footer.
04:31It looks like they're hiding for some reason. Let's see what's happening there.
04:35My footer is beneath the Main layer. My Main layer has this background element.
04:40What I really need to do is create another element called the Background element.
04:43I'll create another layer folder, and I'll call it Background, and I'm going to
04:48move this to the bottom.
04:49Sometimes when we move things to the bottom, presents a problem because you end
04:53up putting the folder inside the Footer Folders.
04:55If I open this up, you'll see that there's my Background folder.
04:58So that's not exactly what I want.
04:59Sometimes, you have to move the last folder in between two other folders.
05:04Just moving things to the end actually puts them inside the last folder.
05:08So I want to have this Background folder, a Footer folder, and in the Background
05:13folder, let me zoom out, and I'm going to grab this part of the background.
05:18This background is actually two layers, two pieces of art that look the same.
05:21So I'm going to click on this one, and then Shift-click on the one to the left,
05:26and come over here, drag this to the Background layer, and now my footer
05:31reappears down here.
05:33So this is looking pretty good.
05:33I got a background element, I got a footer element, a header element, and my
05:40Main section right here, which is awesome.
05:43This will be probably a good time to lock some of these layers because in most
05:47pages that I will be working with, I'm not really going to mess with the
05:50header or the footer or the background. I really want to mess around with main
05:54section of what I'm doing.
05:56Then I tend to lock these other layers, and then I can just not worry about
05:59clicking on this background and doing anything to the Header section.
06:03I would probably also move this navigation into a Header section.
06:07A navigation might be something you put into its own folder.
06:11So inside the Header folder, I can create a sub-folder by using this little icon right here.
06:17If I click on that, it's not going to look like anything right now, but if I
06:20open up this triangle, you'll see that I have another item right here, another
06:25sort of layer sub-folder and I can rename that Navigation, and I'm going to grab
06:32the elements that make up the navigation, click, hold down Shift, click, click,
06:37click a few times, get them all.
06:39Let's click and drag them, get them all, undo, and then I'll just use this
06:45little dot right here to move them into this Navigation folder.
06:49So now I have a Header folder which has the navigation all in one sub-layer
06:53which I can also lock.
06:54I don't want to mess with it or just lock the Header folder.
06:57That locks all the sub-folders within them.
07:00So now I can't do anything with the navigation.
07:02Here's my white background.
07:03Maybe that would be good to go on this background layer.
07:07So let me unlock the background first, click on this white layer right here,
07:12then click and drag that on to the background, and lock that, and now I can't
07:17even click on this background.
07:18That's beginning to look like a really decent template for web work.
07:25Of course, with any object you also have some of these options right here that
07:29are also available on the Properties panel to change the opacity of an object.
07:33So if I can reduce the opacity there if I want to, and I can also apply layer
07:38Effects or Blending Modes here.
07:41So these Blending Modes affect how an object looks when it's place on top of another object.
07:47It's really good to just kind of play around with them.
07:49If you're familiar with Photoshop, these would be very familiar to you.
07:54If you look at the Options menu, you have a few options here.
07:57You can create layers, sub-layers from right here, you can make copies of
08:00layers, that's kind of good.
08:01If you're working with States, you can have a layer that appears on every State.
08:07States have to do with animation.
08:09So take a look at the States movie if you want to find out more about creating States.
08:13You can also share layer to pages which I'll be talking about in the Pages movie.
08:19You can also lock and unlock here, and you have these Thumbnail options which
08:23just allow you to make your thumbnails a lot bigger.
08:27So if we look at this, you could see these thumbnails are pretty huge.
08:31That's probably too large.
08:33Let's go back to thumbnails, and that's probably a good size right there.
08:40A couple of other things that you have in the Layers panel,
08:43you can also add a Mask to a layer by hitting this icon right here.
08:48Check the movies on Mask if you want to learn more about Masking, and you can
08:52also create a new Bitmap image, so this is creating a new empty layer.
08:56Let's come over here to the main section and just add an empty layer, and
09:01there's an empty layer.
09:02Now, why would you want to do that?
09:03Well, sometimes you want to create a layer that you want to start drawing
09:06into with a Bitmap.
09:07I'm not really sure that's too useful, because as soon as you draw with a
09:11Bitmap, you'll also be creating an empty layer, but this is one more option in
09:15this particular panel.
09:16So, I'll go ahead and delete that, and that's pretty much everything there is
09:20to know about layers.
09:21If you love being organized, Fireworks really gives you a lot of great
09:24options with layers, and they should be pretty familiar to you if you use other Adobe products.
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Working with pages
00:01Fireworks pages lets you organize large projects into different parts or
00:04allow you to create a prototype that simulates an entire web site. So let's take a look.
00:09You create pages through the Pages panel.
00:11If you don't see the Pages panel already on your screen, go to the Window
00:14menu and select pages.
00:16It's right by this group of layers and States.
00:19To create a page, click on this Add page Icon right here, Add/Duplicate page.
00:25Click on that and you create another page.
00:27pages don't have to be the same size.
00:29I can change the size of this page by going to the Properties panel and
00:32selecting Canvas Size, and from here I'll type in another value for this
00:36page, so 728 by 90.
00:37So if you're doing a different campaign, say a banner campaign for this web
00:42site, you can keep all the assets together by creating pages and modifying their sizes.
00:47To delete pages, just drag them over to the Delete Icon right here at the
00:51bottom of the panel.
00:52You can also make a copy of a page by clicking on the page and dragging it to this new icon.
00:57Right here it makes a copy of the page.
00:59And if you want to, you can start working how this content is different from the other page.
01:03You can create a set of elements that appears on every page.
01:07So what I'm going to do is delete this page right here.
01:09Actually no, let me leave that page, and what I'm going to do is modify this page
01:14so that it can become my master page.
01:16So you can use the set of elements that appears on every page.
01:20When you convert an ordinary page to a master page, you're going to see some
01:24changes in the Layers panel, so let's take a look.
01:26I'm going to come over here to Layers panel, and I already have all the content
01:30that goes on a page in this folder.
01:32So I'll grab that folder, and I'll delete it--click on this Delete Icon.
01:37I have a page right here that will make an excellent master page.
01:40So I'm going to go to the Pages panel and go to my pop-up menu and select Set As Master Page.
01:46So now this page moves up to the very top, and it has this little extra label
01:51here called Master Page, so this is a master page now.
01:54If I go this page and I go to layers, you'll see that this page gets an extra
01:59set of layers down at the bottom, and it's called Master Page layer.
02:03So if you open that up, you'll see that there are all the layers that are in my
02:06master page and all new pages will get this as well.
02:09So now what I need to do is get rid of this Background, Footer, and Header
02:15because now they're extra on this page, so I'll just delete them.
02:18Click on this Header, delete, and delete that again. Footer, delete.
02:28Might have to hit it twice. And then this Background and delete.
02:34And now you can see that all the elements of my master page are in that background.
02:38They are locked, so I can't click and move anything on my master page.
02:42I can only interact with the elements that are on this page.
02:45If I go to the Pages tab here, any time I create a new page, they will get all
02:50those elements automatically.
02:53Even though new pages inherit the master page layer, all the features are
02:57not necessarily shared.
02:58So, for example, you can still resize pages or change their background color.
03:02So you may want to click on to the left of each one of these pages a link to
03:06link this page to the master page.
03:09That way if I make any changes like to the background color or to the size of
03:13any page, it'll affect all the pages.
03:15You can also do that by going to this pop-up menu and selecting Link here.
03:19I can only choose Unlink, so it's not on.
03:21You can click here and select Link To Master Page.
03:25And now I can create some additional pages for this project.
03:27So I'll call my master page Layout, and I'll call this one the Home page. Artists here.
03:41Now it's going to give you an error here because you don't want to use any funky characters.
03:46So let me just type in and Register.
03:51So I'll make sure these are also linked by clicking on this icon to the left.
03:55And now if I go to my master page and I move any of these items, these
03:59layers are still locked.
04:02So if I move anything, it will be moved on all of my pages, which is great.
04:06Back to my master page, I'll just undo that a few times so it goes back to where
04:11it's supposed to be.
04:12Master pages are a great way of sharing elements between pages.
04:16What happens if you want to share something but not to every page?
04:19You want to share something that will be the same in some pages but not all.
04:24You could do that with shared layers, so I'm going to go back to layers here and
04:27I'm going to use this element, I want to have this preview of our mobile site on
04:31some pages but not all the pages.
04:34So I'm going to add another layer here.
04:35I'll call this thing Mobile, and I'm going to click on this group and move it
04:43over to the Mobile folder here.
04:46And you can see that it's now in that folder.
04:51So if I wanted to, I can click right here and select Share Layer To All Pages.
04:56Make sure that this mobile site is on all my pages, so if I go to any of these
05:00other pages, you can see that they will all have that little our mobile section.
05:04In some of these pages, it's the only other content there.
05:07But what if I just wanted to add that to some pages, not all?
05:10So I'm going to go back to layers, click on this Mobile layer, and go to this
05:15pop-up and select Share layer To Pages.
05:18It lets me control which pages this layer is going to be shared with.
05:22So I can say this is going to be on their Home page, the Artists page, but
05:25not the Schedule page.
05:27I'll click Remove--and not the Registration page--and I'll hit Remove, click OK,
05:33and if I go to my pages, you can see that it's not in Register.
05:36It is on the Venue Travel page but not on the Schedule.
05:39It's a great way of creating certain sections that are shared only in certain pages.
05:45You can also go to the File menu and preview your pages in a browser.
05:49This is kind of cool.
05:50Let me go over here to File and select Preview in Browser and see this page in Safari.
05:55So this is going to show me all the compression and how the page is looking in Safari.
06:04Now if the pages have interactivity, you can actually preview the page in Safari
06:08and see how the interactivity or the links from one page to another will work.
06:13I'm going to show you how to build interactivity in a separate movie, but I want
06:15to show you what it works like.
06:17So I'm going to click over to this more finished version of this web site and
06:21I'm going to go to the File menu and select Preview in Browser.
06:24This time I'm going to preview all the pages in Safari.
06:27So I'll click on that, it's going to take a second to render everything, and there it is.
06:34It looks like just before, but if I come over here, you can see that some of
06:38these menu navigation here is working.
06:40If I click on this, it takes me to the Artists page.
06:43So these things are linking to the other pages, and that's kind of a cool
06:47thing that you could do.
06:48You could actually preview the way a page is working on your browser and test
06:54some of the interactivity that you've built.
06:57In addition to that, I can export pages.
06:59If I go to the File menu and select Export, I can export this whole thing as a PDF.
07:05So I'm going to click on the Desktop here and PDF is already selected.
07:09So I'm going to choose that, I want to make sure I choose All Pages here
07:14and I'll hit Export.
07:15You can tell it's done when this thing is no longer blue.
07:17Okay, looks like it's done, it launched the page in my PDF browser.
07:22The nice thing about PDFs is they still allow you to link and keep some of the
07:27interactivity although not as well as exporting something as an HTML page.
07:32But at least, you can send this to a client and they can maybe mark it up if
07:35they like using PDF marking tools.
07:37If you want to give them a better experience or a more web-like experience,
07:41you can go to the File menu and select Export, and this time we'll export this as a web page.
07:47So we'll go to HTML and Images, and when I export, make sure we export HTML
07:52File, and you definitely want to make sure you export Slices so that you can
07:56see your rollovers.
07:57So if that's not selected, make sure you choose that.
07:59Include Areas without Slices so it renders the whole page.
08:03I like to also turn this thing on called Put Images in Subfolder.
08:06Otherwise, you'll see your pages and all the graphics in one folder and that
08:11can get really crazy.
08:12So I'm going to click on New Folder, I'll call it rouxprototype here, hit
08:16Create, and I'll just hit Export.
08:18It's going to take a while again.
08:23So again, it might be done already. And here is my prototype.
08:28You can see that it looks like it only did one page.
08:30So let me go back and show you. I should have clicked on something else.
08:35So I'll do Export again, and yeah, do make sure you do All Pages instead of just
08:41the Current Page, and we'll hit Export.
08:45And it looks like it already exists, but it doesn't matter.
08:47That's why it was so quick. It just did everything for one page.
08:49So this is going to take a little longer now.
08:52Okay, let's check it out. And here are all my pages.
08:58You could have renamed this something other than Desktop.
09:00It doesn't really matter because it's just a prototype that you're going to
09:03show to people, so we can drag this onto a browser and this will be like a
09:07little web site that you can post somewhere and you can have people interact
09:11with and maybe send you back some notes about things that they would like to
09:14see different at your site.
09:16So this is an awesome way of building an interactive prototype.
09:19Fireworks writes all the code for you.
09:21I really wouldn't use that code at all in a production environment, but it's
09:24a super way of generating a prototype that you can give to your clients and get feedback on.
09:29Sometimes it's really hard for people to visualize how linking and how different
09:33pages are going to work.
09:35So this is one of the reasons I love Fireworks as a prototyping tool.
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Working with Web Layers
00:00By now you may have noticed that there is a special layer called the web layer.
00:04This layer is normally invisible and holds objects that are used for web interactivity.
00:09There are two tools that create web layers: the Hotspot tool and the Slice tool.
00:13So let's see how they work.
00:15So the Hotspot tool is right here, and it creates areas that can be clicked on
00:18or interacted with.
00:20They're great for building prototypes and can help you create quick rollover effects.
00:23There are three different types of Hotspot Tools, and they're really just
00:26different shapes for the tool, so let's make one.
00:29We'll scroll down over here to this Venue section, and I'm going to click on--I
00:34already have this one selected, the rectangle one, and then I'll drag myself a
00:38selection rectangle here and let go.
00:40You can see that we get this blue outline, and that is now an item in the web layer.
00:47So you could do that for that section and also we'll do one for the Schedule.
00:50You don't have to use a rectangle.
00:52Of course, you can use any of the other items which are a Circle Hotspot tool
00:56just for creating circle hotspots like that, and of course also a Polygon tool,
01:01which is right here.
01:02So if you want to create some irregular shapes, then sometimes you could just
01:06trace things like this if you want hotspot to be around specific area.
01:10So I'm going to delete that.
01:12When you add a hotspot, you can add a link from that hotspot to another section
01:16by looking at the Properties panel and typing in a link here.
01:19This can be a regular web site, so this can be http:// then whatever web site
01:24you want to go to, or it can be a page.
01:26So if you already have pages on your site, you can link this to another page
01:29just by using this pop-up right here.
01:31So I'll link this to the venue-travel page, and then I'll click over here and
01:36link this to the schedule page right here. So excellent!
01:40Now let's preview that and see how it works.
01:42Go to File menu, select Preview in Browser, and then Preview all pages in Safari.
01:47You want to make sure you preview all pages, or you'll only see the page that
01:50you're on and you won't be able to click to a different page.
01:53Let's scroll all the way to the bottom, you can see that when I move my mouse
01:56over this section, it gives me that little Hand tool.
01:58Same thing when I come right here.
02:00And if I click, it takes me to the Venue page and hit the Back button and click
02:05on this, it takes me to the Schedule.
02:07So that's working pretty well. Let's close out of that.
02:11So let's see how you would do a rollover effect.
02:14I'm going to switch over to the artists page, and I have pictures of some artists here.
02:19What I want to do is, whenever I roll over a picture of an artist, I want to see
02:22a picture of some of their artwork.
02:24So to do that, I'm going to need to create slices for each of these artists.
02:28There's another way of creating a slice.
02:30If you select an object and you right-click, you can insert a Rectangular
02:35Slice or a Polygon Slice.
02:36You can have it create the slice automatically for you based on the object
02:40that you have selected.
02:41So I'm going to insert a Rectangular Slice right there, and I need to do that for
02:45all of them. I click on more than one. Let's go ahead and do that.
02:52So what I'm doing to scroll around is pulling down the spacebar to bring up the
02:55Hand tool and move it around.
02:58Then I'm going to hold down the Shift key and then clicking on these other pictures.
03:03Then I'm going to right-click and I'll say Insert Rectangular Slice, and this
03:07time it's going to ask me, since multiple items are selected, do you want to
03:10create one slice that covers all of them or multiple slices.
03:13I'll do Multiple and it creates all of them for me automatically. Excellent!
03:17So once I have my different slices, what I want to do is I want to go into
03:21States and create another state for each one of these artists.
03:24So I'll add another state, see that we've got normal state with just the page
03:29and then another state for what's going to be our rollover.
03:31So let's go back to State 1, and what I'll do is I'll grab some of these--
03:37actually grab one, and I'll copy it by going Edit > Copy, or Command+C, Ctrl+C on a PC.
03:43Go to State 2 and I'll paste that right there and see if I can bring it to this page.
03:48I've got Onion Skinning on in my States palette, so if I want to make sure that
03:52it's in the right place, I'm going to click right there to make sure that I have
03:55State 1 is just the picture, State 2 is the picture of the person's artwork.
04:00I do like having this Onion Skinning on most of the time, especially when I'm
04:03copying between states.
04:05So I'm going to do the same thing for this.
04:06Copy, go to State 2, paste, then move this one into position right behind this
04:12guy right here, come over here and just keep on doing that for all of them.
04:17And I can also turn off the web layer.
04:20So I can hide all those temporarily and Shift-click to select these and then cut
04:28them, go to the States, click on the second State, paste.
04:34So now I have some pictures, and I have a web layer that created the slice.
04:42So slice normally is for cutting a graphic.
04:46When you create a slice, you're creating a cutout of your web page that you're
04:50going to save separately.
04:51So I made the slice and what I need to do now is create a rollover out of it.
04:56See this little Target Icon right here?
04:58If I click on that and I drag it out, I can make one section of the page linked
05:04to a separate section.
05:05You can also do it to yourself.
05:07So I've got this web slice, I'm going to drag it and move it right on top of this person.
05:12So what that's going to do is create a swap image, and what it's going to swap
05:16the image from is whatever state I tell it to swap it from.
05:20So I'm going to choose State 2 and do the same thing for all of these guys, same
05:23thing, swap State 2, do this, drag this out, put it here. Okay, almost done.
05:36Okay, so my rollovers should be done now, let's go ahead and test this out.
05:43Go to the File menu > Preview in Browser > Preview all pages, and now when I
05:48roll over any of these photos, I'll get the second state.
05:52That is really cool.
05:53Let me go back into Fireworks and do one more thing.
05:56So I want to create a hotspot on these names so that when people roll over their
06:00names, this picture will also switch to State 2.
06:04So to do that, I'm going to need to make some hotspots on each of the names.
06:09I'll just go ahead and select all of them.
06:11So what I'm doing here is holding down the Shift key to click on one, spacebar
06:15to bring the Hand tool, click and drag to scroll, let spacebar go, Shift key,
06:21click, let go the Shift key, spacebar, click and drag.
06:24After a while you kind of get really good.
06:26You're not even thinking about what you're doing there.
06:29You're just kind of doing it.
06:30So right-click on this, insert a hotspot this time, and Multiple items are selected.
06:36Do you want to create one or multiple hotspots?
06:38I'll say Multiple and it very quickly lets you create all the hotspots at once.
06:43Then what I'm going to do is come to each one of these hotspots, grab the Target
06:46Icon and target each one of the pictures.
06:50State 2, click on this, drag this over here, State 2, and do the same thing for all of them.
06:59And it's so beautiful when you get to the point where you're not thinking
07:02about what you're doing,
07:03you're just kind of clicking and dragging and moving your hands everywhere.
07:06That's the beauty of learning some of the command keys and some of the shortcuts.
07:11Okay, cool! So let's check that out now.
07:13File > Preview in Browser > Preview all pages in Safari.
07:18And when I roll over these names, I will also get the images over here to roll over.
07:25Those things can also be clickable, so you can make either this or this clickable.
07:30So hotspots or slices can be clicked to something else, so.
07:37And we can also control how these images are compressed.
07:41So you can see there I can compress some with other compression format other than PNG32.
07:46I might want to compress these with JPEGs since they're photos.
07:48They're so tiny though it's not really going to make a huge difference.
07:51So this kind of interactivity creates really complex code that might not be so suitable.
07:56So when you're using these slices and hotspots, you can create a preview.
08:00Remember, that you can also export this to either a PDF file or export it to a
08:07HTML page, and it's going to generate all the code for you to be able to show
08:11your clients what your mockup looks like when at work.
08:15So even though I would never use that code in a production environment, you can
08:18very quickly create something that you can send clients to.
08:21And if you want to more about how to do that, make sure you watch the video on
08:24working with pages because it has all that.
08:27But this is an awesome way of creating interactivity really quick when you're
08:30just in the mockup stage or the wireframe stage, that lets clients see
08:34functionality on a web site.
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6. Using Symbols
Creating graphic symbols
00:00Symbols are a way of saving objects so that you can use them over and over.
00:04If you're familiar with Flash, symbols in Fireworks work pretty much the same way.
00:08To usually create symbols from existing elements on a page. In the Pages movie,
00:12you may have seen that we can share items between pages by creating layers that
00:17are shared to different places.
00:19However, in the instance of this particular section of my page, I'm noticing
00:24that when I go to different pages, I actually want that group of items to be
00:28positioned in different places.
00:30So just simply sharing the layer is not going to work because this object needs
00:33to be up here on this page.
00:35And if I go to the artists page, it needs to be down here.
00:39Same elements, I don't really want to repeat the work of copying and pasting
00:43some of those elements because I may want to change something about one of those
00:46elements later on and I want them to be upgraded everywhere, so this is a
00:50perfect candidate for a symbol.
00:52So let's go back to the Home page, and to create a symbol is really super-simple.
00:58All you have to do is go to the Modify menu and go to the Symbol here and
01:02select Convert to Symbol.
01:03Really most of the time, I just right-click on the element and choose Convert to
01:07Symbol from the pop-up.
01:09It's probably a quicker way of getting to it, so I'm going to select Convert to Symbol.
01:11You can see that there are three different symbol types.
01:14We're going to be covering Graphics in this movie and then Animation and button
01:17in some other movies.
01:18So this Graphic is the most basic of the symbols, and I'm going to make this a
01:24mobilesection here, and I'll select OK.
01:28So that's pretty much it.
01:29It just created the symbol, placed it on a library that we can access in other pages.
01:35So notice that if you go to the Layers panel and we open the Page Elements, you
01:40can see that one of the cool things about the layers in Fireworks that they each
01:45have this little Micro Icon that shows you what type of layer it is.
01:48When we create a symbol, that Micro Icon looks like a little Plus sign.
01:52So this is now a symbol, it's no longer an object.
01:56Go to the Window menu so we can pull up the Document Library, and I'll show you
02:00that we have different symbols from other things that we've done.
02:04Let me see if I can find the one that I just created, and yes, it's right here
02:07and it's called the mobilesection.
02:09It's already there, so we can go to another page, let's go back to this right
02:13now and go to another page, I'll go to the artists page, and what I'll do is I
02:18will take this one out of here.
02:20This is just a group right now, so I'll delete this, and I can go to my Common
02:24Library and just drag this into position.
02:27And now I've copied that entire section into another page and I can position it anywhere.
02:32So this is almost like a really cool super-layer that we can place anywhere and
02:37when you update it in one place, it'll get updated somewhere else.
02:41So let's keep on doing that for some of the other layers.
02:43Let's go ahead and double-click on this Align panel here to hide it a little bit
02:47so we could get more room.
02:48So I'll go to the schedule, I'll take this out of here, I'll drag this from
02:54Common Library and position it where I want it on this page, and go over to this page.
03:01Sometimes it helps if you're in between pages and you know that they're going to
03:05go at exactly the same position.
03:07What I can do is just go to this page and I'm going to select Edit > Copy, and
03:11then go to this page, delete the group and I'm going to hit Paste and it's going
03:16to place it in exactly the same position as in the previous page.
03:20So now when I go from one page to another, you could see that it's exactly where
03:23it's supposed to be.
03:25In this page, it probably also could be in the same exact position.
03:28So Edit > Paste so now these three pages have that object in the same exact position.
03:35On this page, since I'm using a slightly different paragraph up here, it's moved
03:39up just a hair, and on the Home page, it's the first thing on this right rail.
03:44So to edit a symbol, you could just simply double-click on the symbol itself and
03:48that enters the symbol editing mode or the object editing mode.
03:52You could tell that we're an object editing mode because everything around the
03:55object that I'm working on has faded out a little bit.
03:59If you take a look over here at the top left of the workspace, you could see a
04:02hierarchy of where we are in the document, so you could see this Home link right here.
04:07To get back out to the Home page, just click on that and it takes us out of that
04:11symbol editing mode.
04:12So I can double-click here to go back into it.
04:15Here's the hierarchy, double-click also on the outside of the symbol.
04:19So if I double-click right here on this area, I'm clicking somewhere outside of that symbol.
04:24It takes us back to the Home page.
04:26You can also of course double-click on the symbol from the Document Library.
04:30If I double-click on that, I enter this mode.
04:33Now this is kind of nice because in this mode, I don't see the rest of the page.
04:36Sometimes it's good to see the rest of the page to see how my layout will work,
04:40but sometimes you want to isolate things, so this is a better mode for isolating
04:43some of the contents.
04:44So anything that I do on this page will be reflected into some of the
04:49other pages as well.
04:50So let me go to go back into Home.
04:56So let's go ahead and see if we can modify something about that symbol.
04:59So this is a group, so I'm going to ungroup it. I hit Command+Shift+G to ungroup these items.
05:03I'll click on this and let me just change the color of one of these headlines so
05:08that's not maybe bright enough so that's really obvious.
05:12I'll double-click to get out of symbol mode, and then I'm going to go to another page.
05:16And I can see that although this is in a different position, because I edited
05:19the master symbol, this instance of the symbol has the same change, and if I go
05:24to my other pages, I can see that it's everywhere in my documents.
05:29So that is really cool.
05:30Symbols can save you a lot of time.
05:32If you have a lot of content between pages that is the same but it's not in the
05:36same position, symbols--especially graphic symbols--are the way to go.
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Creating 9-slice scaling symbols
00:00Whenever you create a symbol, you have the option of making the symbol a
00:049-slice scaling symbol.
00:05And that allows you to create a special kind of symbol that has or uses
00:09the 9-slice guides.
00:11That can be really handy when you're redesigning a site or an interface, so
00:13let's take a look at how you can take advantage of it.
00:16On one of these pages, I have a registration form, and on this registration
00:20form, I want to create a button right here.
00:23So I already have a picture of a button that I want to use right here, and I'm
00:28going to grab this button, but I don't want it to have the OK text in it, and I
00:33want to be able to resize it to make it a little wider.
00:36So first off, I want to need to get rid of this slightly gray area around the button.
00:41So I'll select it first, click on the Magic Wand tool, and then click
00:46anywhere on this gray area.
00:48I can adjust the Tolerance right here if I want to, but it looks like I did a
00:51pretty good job getting it, I mean, maybe go not as much.
00:54That looks pretty good.
00:56Once I have that gray area selected, I can hit the Delete key to get rid of it,
01:00and what I need to do is also get rid of this text inside it.
01:03So I'm clicking to select that item and I'm going to click on the Marquee tool
01:07and make another selection inside this bitmap.
01:09Okay, so first I'm going to hold on the Command key.
01:11We can see that little icon that looks like a pointer with a cut.
01:14So that will cut the image, and then I want to add the Option key while I'm dragging.
01:19That should leave an original copy of this thing where it used to be and just
01:23drag a little copy of this piece and move it over here.
01:27So that gives me a button that I can use.
01:30Now this is cool, but when I resize it horizontally, you'll see that it kind of
01:35distorts some of these edges.
01:38If you've seen the video on using the 9-slice Scaling tool, I'm pretty much
01:41doing the same thing.
01:42One of these options to scale objects is the 9-slice Scaling tool, and what that
01:46does is gives you these little handles that let you protect certain areas.
01:51But the problem with that tool is once you double-click to apply, then slices
01:56are gone, and to get those back, you have to click on this tool again, and then
02:00it gives you the default position for the slices, so you have to go move these
02:03guides again and protect them again.
02:05So it'll be nice if we could create a symbol that remembers the positions of the
02:109-slice Scaling tool.
02:11So I'm going to do that, but before I do that I'm just going to copy this
02:14onto my other document.
02:16So I'll go to the Edit menu, select Copy, come back here, and I'll paste, so I
02:21want this button down here.
02:23And I will right-click to convert this to a symbol, and I'll call my symbol
02:30macbutton_btn, and this time I'm going to select Graphic, and then I'll turn on
02:37this option right here, Enable 9-slice scaling guides.
02:40I'm going to say OK, and that creates the symbol.
02:44If I double-click on the symbol to edit it, I see that my 9-slice scaling guides
02:48are now there and I can rearrange this to protect my corners.
02:53This is just like using a 9-slice Scaling tool, but it remembers where you put the guides.
02:59So that's really super-useful if we're going to be using that over and over.
03:03Once I got the corners protected, I'm going to click over here to go back to
03:06my registration page.
03:08And when I resize this graphic, it'll protect my edges really well.
03:14So I can make that button as wide as I need to.
03:17And then I can put whatever text I want on top of it.
03:31So if you find yourself using the 9- slice Scaling tool on a specific item a lot,
03:37it might be a good idea to just make that item a symbol that you can just resize
03:45at any point in time without having to go back to that tool.
03:48So there. I have that done, and it's fairly easy to do.
03:52If you're using that a lot, this is a great way of making a quicker version of
03:56the 9-slice Scaling tool that you can use over and over.
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Creating button symbols
00:00Buttons are a special type of symbol that come with some pre-defined states.
00:04They're quite handy for building interactivity like our top navigation here.
00:08So let's check them out.
00:10Let's go over to the Master Page, because these items are all in the Master Page.
00:14And I want to create buttons for each one of these elements.
00:17You'll notice that I have created little squares for the backgrounds for each of these buttons.
00:22You'll see why in a minute.
00:23So I'm going to select both the text and the background rectangle, and then I'm
00:28going to right-click, select Convert to Symbol.
00:31From here, I'm going to type in nav_home_btn, and I'm going to choose button as
00:39the Type, so I'll click OK.
00:42On my Document Library, it shows there my nav_home_btn. I'm not going to need to grab different instances of it.
00:48So I'll just go ahead and keep on making my other buttons.
00:52Let's go ahead and grab those too.
00:53Convert to Symbol, nav_artists_btn.
00:57Make sure I choose button and click on this and this, Shift-click on both of those.
01:04Convert to Symbol, click OK, and do the same thing for the other ones.
01:13If you ever screw up and do just like Animation or forget to click on button you
01:17can always modify that by going to your Document Library and selecting
01:21Properties and then changing the Type to button.
01:24So don't worry about it if you forget to do it properly.
01:28So the thing about button Symbols is that they already come with some states
01:33that are pre-defined.
01:34So if I double-click on this and I look at the States panel I'll see that I have
01:39already States for Up, Over, Down, and Over While Down.
01:44So those are states that will automatically activate depending on what you
01:48do with the buttons.
01:49So if I'm over the button, it's like a hover effect. If I click down, it's what
01:54happens when I click down on the button and Over While Down.
01:57So what happens when I'm over the button while I am clicking down at the same time,
02:01I really need to only use the Up and Over.
02:04So although they already have the states, none of the states have anything
02:08in them, so I'm going to go to Up, select all, so I'm hitting Command+A--
02:12would be Ctrl+A on a PC--and select Copy. Go to Over and just paste.
02:16It should paste in the same position.
02:19So what I want to do is reverse the direction of this gradient.
02:22So I'm going to come over here and click and drag that and make that gradient go the other way.
02:28So that's good enough.
02:29When I'm rolling over this button, I wanted to show the second State as a
02:33gradient that is inverted, so it just looks a little bit different, and what
02:37I'll do is I'm going to go to my Styles, and you could see that I have both of
02:43those styles of the buttons in this document.
02:45If you don't have them, you can click on this icon right here and it will add
02:49any of the gradients to this window right there.
02:52So now that I have both of those, then I will double-click on this, grab these
02:57two elements, copy them to the Clipboard. So Command+C, Ctrl+C on a PC.
03:02Go to Over, Paste, and then click on this and click on my different direction
03:09style, so the gradient goes the other way.
03:11Double-click on the background to get out, double-click on this and just keep on doing that.
03:16So click on both of these, Copy, switch to the Over state, Paste, change the
03:22background, and so on and so forth.
03:25I don't see my other states here.
03:28So I'm just going to recreate this button the proper way.
03:31So I'll grab these two items, just copy them from inside the Symbol.
03:37Double-click to get out.
03:38I'll delete this symbol and I'll also delete it from here.
03:41And this is getting a little hard to see there.
03:43Double-click on this tab to hide these so I could just focus on this and looks
03:48like it's still a graphic. That's probably my fault.
03:52I probably changed the wrong Type when I clicked on it.
03:55So just let me Undo, I'll go back here to Properties and make this a button Symbol.
04:03So let's see if that works now.
04:04Now I have all the states. That's good, okay. So it's just really my bad.
04:07So I'm going to click on Over, Paste, click on this background, back to my
04:13Styles, switch the direction of the gradient, double-click to get back.
04:17It looks like one of these might be not quite aligning properly here.
04:25So let me double-click on this to add it to Symbol, then I'll do snap the pixels
04:32here, see if it fixes that little problem.
04:34I'll check my Over State as well, and it looks like it's having the same problem
04:37there just on that particular frame, so I'll do Snap To Pixel on this one again,
04:42and it just moves everything properly aligning into pixels.
04:45That looks pretty good there.
04:47So I've got all my buttons done. Let me go ahead and try this out.
04:50I'll switch over to Pages and switch over to the Home page, and now you can see
04:55that these automatically get little slice symbols.
04:58Let me go ahead and preview this in a Browser.
05:00So I'll preview all pages in Safari, and my rollovers are working pretty well here.
05:07Now they're not clicking anywhere because I haven't added links to them.
05:09So let's do that now and that needs to be done again in the Master Page.
05:14So go to the Master Page and go to my layers to turn on my web layers, and there
05:21I can click on each one of these and link them to one of the pages.
05:24So this one will link to the Home page, this one links to the artist page,
05:31and so on and so forth. VENUE/TRAVEL and REGISTER.
05:40Now no matter what you do, you're always going to end up with these
05:42little spaces sometimes.
05:44So I just really need to use the Arrow keys to move my button a little bit to
05:49the right here, and I want to check all the other ones.
05:52These look like they are overlapping, so I actually need to move this one there
05:56to the right, and this one also now needs to move.
06:00It's not really going to kill you to have that little bit of an overlap, I
06:03am being a perfectionist it looks like this, so I am in the same problem as that other.
06:08So I double-click to get it to the Symbol, clicked on it and Snap To Pixel, that
06:13makes everything fit perfectly, and we'll go to the other State and just check it
06:17out, Over state, it looks like it's off just a hair.
06:21So Modify > Snap To Pixel. That looks pretty good.
06:25Double-click to get out, there is no overlap, everything looks perfect, all my
06:30buttons are also linking to pages.
06:33So let me preview this again in a Browser, Preview in Browser > all pages in Safari.
06:42And now of course, I should have been previewing--not out of the Master Page, but
06:46it doesn't really matter.
06:47As soon as I click on one of these buttons it's taken me to the right page and
06:51everything is working pretty well.
06:54So you can see that button Symbols help you create a lot of really quick
06:57interactivity, and they're super-awesome for building navigation and prototypes.
07:01I think once you get used to them, you'll use them all the time in your workflow.
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Creating animation symbols
00:00Out of all the Symbol types, the one you'll probably use the least is
00:03the Animation Symbols.
00:05It can be useful sometimes, but because you have to save animations in Fireworks
00:10as GIF files, they don't always hold the best quality.
00:13And so I'm going to show you how to do them, but it's probably something you're
00:16not going to use very often.
00:17It's still quite cool though, so let's check it out.
00:19So what I'm going to do is create an animation where I'm going to scroll
00:23between pictures of the art that somebody has done and pictures of the artists
00:28that that art belongs to.
00:29So what I've done here is carefully spaced these items so they are exactly 15 pixels apart.
00:35So I'm going to ungroup this one, so you can see what I've done.
00:37I've got a picture of a piece of art right here and then another picture of
00:41another piece of art right here.
00:42Each one of these tiles is 90x90 pixels.
00:45the distance in between each of these tiles is 15 pixels.
00:49So I did that by selecting these and going to the space under the Align panel
00:54and make sure that I had 15 pixels right here, and then I clicked on this item,
00:58that spaces them out evenly.
00:59So if these were imperfect, you would see that, if I click on that, spaces them out evenly.
01:05So I've done that will all these and I've also grouped these two pieces just so
01:10that they are easier to deal with, and I want to add another copy of the art to
01:14the right-hand side.
01:15I'm clicking and dragging while holding down the Option key it would be Alt key on a PC.
01:20And when I let go, it makes a copy.
01:22So you can tell that they are not perfectly positioned because this should be
01:25930 down here, and it's not.
01:28So it means that I'm off by a couple of pixels right there.
01:31So I'll just space them evenly 15 pixels apart again, and I can see that it's 930 pixels.
01:37So my animation will go from this art being in this position and then scrolling
01:41and stopping when it gets to this position, and then scrolling until it gets to
01:46that position and stopping, and then it's going to repeat over and over again.
01:50So to do that what I need to do is animate this object from this position to this position.
01:57I need to figure out what the distance between here and here is.
02:02The easiest way to do to that in Fireworks is by using the Guides.
02:05If you drag a Guide and you hold down the Shift key, then you'll get
02:09these little smart information panels that tells you what the distance is between items.
02:13So if I go over here it tells me that the distance from the left top edge of
02:18this document to the position right here is 315 pixels.
02:22If I keep on going all the way out here, it'll tell me that this is 630 pixels.
02:29So from this position right here, 0, to this position is 630 pixels.
02:35Okay, so that's the distance that I'm going to need to move.
02:38What I'm going to do now is select this group of images.
02:41I'm going to right-click and select Convert to Symbol.
02:45This time I want to choose an Animation Symbol. I'll call it Animation and I'll click OK.
02:50When you choose an Animation Symbol the second screen you're going to get
02:53is this Animate panel.
02:54Here you're going to need to decide how you're going to animate this group of images.
02:58So we need to decide how much we're going to move these images.
03:01We've already determined that we're going to move them by 630 pixels.
03:05We want to move them to the left.
03:07So since you're moving on to the left, our direction will be 180 pixels.
03:12So you could click on this if you want to use this, but since it's hard to get
03:16the directions just right, I'd like to just type them up.
03:19So direction 180 will go this way.
03:21Now how many states do we need?
03:22Well, we've got essentially three keyframes that we want to stop in this animation.
03:27So before I do this let me go ahead and cancel, and I'll make a new document just
03:32to show you what we need to do.
03:33We've got three keyframes, so pretend these are like pages, so we'll make
03:40them look like this.
03:42So we've got three points that we want to stop in our animation.
03:47So if we wanted to go just from here to here to here, we will just need three frames.
03:52We want there to be some sort of transition.
03:54So if we add at least one panel of transition, in other words, if our photo goes
03:59from here to something like maybe here, and then it stops right here and then
04:04it has another point of transition here and then maybe stops right there, that
04:09would be a total of five states.
04:11If we want to add a little better and more smooth animation then we might add
04:16two pieces or two states in between each one of these keyframes.
04:20So that would be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven keyframes or seven states.
04:25So if we want that be more smooth, we might add three that would make it nine,
04:32and maybe a little more smooth.
04:35We can add four and that would 11 total of states that we need to create.
04:41Go back here. We've got this right now, and it looks like we've got this moved
04:46over, so let me move it back to its 0-0 position, and actually I'll undo because
04:51it looks like it already took that animation even though I thought I canceled.
04:55So I'm undoing until I get back to this.
04:57So back to creating the Symbol, Convert to Symbol, create the Animation, call it animation.
05:04So we know we want 11 states.
05:06We want to move to 630 pixels and we want to move it to the left-hand side and I'll click OK.
05:12So it's going to tell me that it's going to need to create some additional
05:15states to accommodate the animation.
05:17So I'll select OK and I'll go to my States panel and I'll just check this out.
05:22So that's moving over.
05:23At about the half-way point, it should move to the position that I want, that's
05:28the second keyframe, and then if we keep on clicking, the last frame will be the
05:34last position that I want it to stop at.
05:36So I can preview this if I want to, this is pretty much an animation already.
05:40But I don't really want it to play like this.
05:44What I want is I want it to stop in the middle point, so right here.
05:49So what I'll do is I will create a different timing parameter for each one of
05:53these places where I want it to pause.
05:55So here I'll type in 100th of a second for delay, which just means 1 second.
06:01So I'm double-clicking to the right of each state that I want to be a keyframe,
06:05double-clicking on that and then typing in 100, Enter.
06:09And the last one 100, Enter, and now we will play this, and you see that in
06:15animates nicely and it stops at each of the keyframes, and it's going to
06:19repeat that over and over.
06:20It's doing that because I'm asking it to repeat things forever.
06:24You can click on that and change it to a certain amount of times that you
06:27want it to animate.
06:28That looks really great, except we don't really want to see the rest of the
06:32animation displayed on screen.
06:34We just want to see kind of a window into what's happening while it animates
06:39the other things in between.
06:40So what I'll do is I'll come to my Animation Symbol, which is right here, and I
06:44will add myself a Mask to that.
06:46There's a lot of ways of adding masks.
06:48So I'm just going to create a rectangle.
06:52It doesn't matter if I mess up the size. I'm going to type it in numerically here.
06:56I know this thing needs to be 300 pixels by 300 pixels, and I want the position
07:01to be 0-0, so it's at the top left of the screen.
07:05And then I'm going to give it No Fill and No Stroke. It already has No Stroke.
07:10So now I can grab this Animation Symbol and then go to the Edit menu, select
07:15Cut and find my almost invincible rectangle here and go to Edit and select Paste Inside.
07:22So now if I play the animation, you'll see that it plays really nicely in its own
07:28spot and that's a really cool Animation Symbol.
07:32So although you might not use this very often, it's really a cool feature of
07:36Fireworks that you can create different kinds of symbols, and the Animation
07:40Symbols just happens to be one of them that you might find some uses for in your projects.
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Using the Common Library
00:00The Common Library is a set of Library items that are going to be available to
00:04all of your projects.
00:06If you know you're going to use an element in other projects, you can also add
00:09Symbols to the Common Library.
00:10So let's take a look at some of the goodies in there, and I'll show you how to add your own.
00:14So if we go to the Window menu, you can see that in addition to the Document
00:18Library, there's a section for a Common Library.
00:22So the Common Library is a set of libraries that come with Adobe Fireworks.
00:27And I want to make it bigger here, so I'm going to collapse these layers
00:31and just bring it up.
00:32And you can see that there are a lot of items that come in.
00:36I'm not sure how often I would use an Anchor, but some of these are pretty
00:39useful, especially some of these buttons that are automatically created for you.
00:44There are also some browser items, so you can find like a little bit of a browser item.
00:50So really to use these, we just click and drag them onto a workspace area.
00:54So you could see this is a Browser Bar that you could use for your mockups.
00:58And let's see what else is in there, HTML.
01:01So some of these are HTML goodies, so you could find stuff like Text Areas, List Items, Links.
01:07So, let's go over to our Pages, and we will go to our register section where we
01:16have a form that can benefit from some of these symbols.
01:19So we will go to HTML right here, and we will find an Input Field.
01:25So it's called a TextField, so you could choose either a Mac or a Windows TextField.
01:30I'm on a Mac, so I'll use a Mac. You can use the Window one if you want.
01:32So, if you drag this out, you could see that it comes out as a Text symbol
01:36and these are scalable.
01:38So if I scale these, they should look pretty good.
01:42I think some of these are like regular Symbols.
01:44So if you Double Click on them you can see how they're made, and most of them are
01:489-slice Scaling tool Symbols.
01:50You could see that the 9-slice Scaling Tools Guide here, it's a little bit over
01:55to the left, so I'll move this over just a little closer to the edge right here.
01:59And go back into my document. And there is that text item.
02:06You could just Option-click and drag these to add the other ones in there.
02:13And Mailing Address and then City, we'll put right there.
02:18We'll use the Transform tool here to make this smaller, and we'll need one of
02:24these for Zip, transform, that a little smaller.
02:30For the State, we're going to need a different one, so HTML Combo Box Mac, drag that out.
02:37And this should be a 9-slice Scaling Symbol, too, so I should be able to resize
02:42this and make it look pretty decent.
02:48And I'll just copy this one now for Telephone.
02:52So we can mockup a form pretty easily by using these Document Common Library
02:57Symbols, and there is a lot of stuff in here.
03:00Some of this is really, really good.
03:01Some of it, I'm not really sure you're going to use a lot, but there's some
03:05Social Network icons like a Google Plus icons and other Twitter icons and stuff like that.
03:11So, use whatever you think works for your project.
03:14I know that the HTML is a great area to look into because it has a lot of good stuff.
03:18So, from the Common Library panel, if we look at the Options, we can add a New
03:23Folder and create our own Common Library Symbols.
03:26So, I'll call this mysymbols and that creates another area right here
03:31underneath this folder.
03:33So if we choose that, then we can actually take anything that we've created and
03:37add it to that section.
03:38And as a matter of fact, when you create a Symbol, I'll just grab this piece
03:42of text right here, and I'll show you that the normal Symbols go in the Document Library.
03:47If I make a New Symbol, or I create a Symbol out of this right here.
03:52So, I'll Convert to Symbol. One of my options is to automatically save this
03:56to the Common Library.
03:57So, if you're already creating a Symbol and you want to make sure that's
04:01available to all of your projects, you can click on that and that saves it
04:04to the Common Library.
04:05If you've already got a Symbol and you just want to convert it, then--let's go to
04:09this Document Library.
04:10There is our little Mac button that we created earlier.
04:13So I'm going to click on that and actually tell it to Save to Common Library.
04:18So Save that into Common Library, and it's going to ask me where do I want to put this.
04:23This is just a Graphic, notice that if I click right here, you can see that the
04:26Common Library is right there and all the sub-folders are underneath there.
04:31So I can go to the mysymbols, which is the folder that I created and hit Save
04:36and it's going to save that. There's mysymbols.
04:40If you don't see it come up, just restart Fireworks.
04:43But there it is and under the Common Library and we can just drag that out into,
04:46not just this document, but any one of our other documents.
04:50So, I like that Fireworks has a lot of pretty useful elements, especially the
04:53Form Element are great to mockup forms with.
04:56It's awesome that you can also add your own, and your own folders so that you can
05:00organize anyone of the symbols that you want to use on multiple projects into a
05:04section that you can use over and over.
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7. Enhancing Fireworks
Creating component symbols
00:00A really powerful feature in Fireworks is the ability to create your own
00:04customizable Component Symbols and add them to the Common Library.
00:07Let's take a look at how we can do that.
00:09So Component Symbol is a special type of Symbol that you can adjust properties
00:14with the Symbol Properties panel.
00:15The Symbol Properties panel is right down here next to the Properties panel.
00:19If I click on a symbol that has Symbol Options, I can click on this panel and I
00:23can modify some options about that panel.
00:26So if you followed the movie on using the Common Library, you saw that I
00:30grabbed these Text elements right here from the Common Library, which right now it's down here.
00:35I'll pull that up.
00:36The Common Library has a lot of really nice library items that you can use
00:40in all your documents.
00:42So this is from the HTML section, and this is called the TextField Mac.
00:47So we grab that, we incorporate it into the document.
00:51When we add an element from this library, there are some elements that
00:54have properties in them.
00:55So if we click on this we can change the Text right here underneath the labels.
01:00So we'll just select that and type in here My Name.
01:03And we can also change the color of the text or the font or anything else or
01:09like the size, for example.
01:10There are some additional things actually underneath here.
01:13But we'll go back up here.
01:15So I'll make my Text black.
01:17If we want to just hide the Text, then I'm just going to make it white to hide
01:22this, and so on and so forth.
01:24And it will be really nice if we could create our own version of a Component
01:28Symbol, so I'm going to show you how to do that.
01:30So if you remember from the movie on creating 9-slice Scaling Symbols, we
01:35created this button and we created a label, but it's not really part of the button.
01:40It'd be really nice to be able to do that in the same way that these Symbols are done.
01:45So to do that, we're going to need to create a Component Symbol.
01:48I'll show you how to do that.
01:49Have another document that I've open right here.
01:51And this is has a Graphic that is a button right now.
01:55So we're going to need to set things up. I'm going to create a TextField.
01:58I'll zoom in a little bit and Click and drag to get myself a nice little TextField.
02:04Type in the word, label. Let's scoot that down a little bit.
02:14Okay, something that's really important if you want to create a TextField that
02:19you want to modify with the Component Symbol, you have to name the Text Label
02:23layer in a special way.
02:25So it has to be named something. We'll call it button and then use the
02:30underscore, and then you can type in the word Label. Make sure it's capital L or
02:34the script is not going to work, and we'll hit Enter.
02:37And now we're ready to make this into a Symbol.
02:39So I'll select this, right-click on it and Convert to Symbol and I want to just
02:43make a Graphic symbol, buttonwithlabel.
02:47I want to turn on Enable 9-slice scaling guides. So I want to control how the symbol resizes.
02:54I could Click on Save to Common Library, but I want to modify the default
02:58position of the scaling guides.
03:00So I'm going to just click OK for right now and then double-click on this
03:04element, that way I get these guides, and I can move them so that I can protect my edges.
03:10So they are right there, scoot that over this way and this one over that way.
03:15It's looking pretty good.
03:17So I'll double-click to get out of here.
03:19And now that I've got this button just how I need it, I'm going to click on it
03:23and actually go to my Document Library, pull that up.
03:26I'll double-click on this layer's panel, too, just to make it smaller.
03:30So here's my buttonwithlabel symbol, ready to be added to the Common Library.
03:34So I'm going to click on this pop-up menu and select Save to Common Library.
03:39This is going to ask me where in the Common Library do you want to save it, so
03:42there are all the folders that appear under the Common Library.
03:45I have created a folder, so if you watched the movie on using the Common
03:49Library, I've got this folder right here called mysymbols, and I can just put the
03:53symbol for this graphic in there. So I'll hit Save.
03:57And that saves it to that folder.
03:59Next, I need to go over to the Commands menu and select Create Symbol Script. I'll choose that.
04:05And then now I need to find the symbol.
04:07So from the Common Library I've placed this under mysymbols.
04:12And I need to expand this, and it's called buttonwithlabel.graphic.
04:16So I'll select Open, that adds the button to this Script menu, and then I'm going
04:22to hit the Plus sign.
04:23And right now I only got one element that I'm able to change.
04:26So there's the button Label, and from here you can choose the Attribute that you want to add.
04:32So I can choose the Attribute Text Characters and the Property Name.
04:37I'll choose the Property Name that it says Label, and then you can put a default
04:41value in there, so, and we'll hit Save.
04:45The script has been created.
04:46I want to go to my previous document and go to the Common Library, find myself
04:53the mysymbols options here.
04:55See if I can drag this over, maybe I have some of these layers locked, see
04:59where's my Layers panel.
05:04Okay, so let me try that again.
05:07Under mysymbols, there's my buttonwithlabel, and now under the
05:12Symbol Properties I could see that I can type in another label and my
05:18button auto-adjusts.
05:20So this is a great way of creating Symbols that have super powers.
05:24It can be adjusted in different ways and saving them to your Common Library, so
05:28you can use them with multiple documents.
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Working with the Commands menu
00:00The Commands menu lets you use pre- made Scripts that can be useful when
00:04working with Fireworks.
00:05Fireworks ships with many Scripts, and you can add more Scripts or create your own.
00:10So there's a lot of useful stuff in there.
00:12For example, you can go to the Commands menu, and there are several Text commands
00:16that you can apply, and one of them is to change the Text to Uppercase.
00:20So if you're looking for a quick way to do that, you can find that right there.
00:23You may have already seen us use something called Add Arrows.
00:27So if we create a line segment like this-- let's go back into Properties.
00:31Let's give it a darker color here.
00:33And you can go to the Commands menu and under Creative, you can Add Arrowheads.
00:38So there are a lot of really useful types of commands that you can find in the Commands menu.
00:44There we added some arrowheads to our little line segment.
00:48That's kind of cool. There's a lot of kind of useful stuff.
00:50There's some stuff that you may not really find a use for, some Batch Commands
00:54for rotating, for example.
00:55There's some stuff that is really cool like creating a jQuery Mobile Theme--
01:02we'll cover that in another movie-- and all kinds of neat things in here.
01:06So really this is something that you want to take a look at.
01:09And some other ones that I like are under Creative. Twist and Fade is a way of animating something.
01:15I'll just select this image, and I'll go to Commands and then Creative and
01:20select Twist and Fade.
01:21This is like a super-charged way of animating an Object, so you can control
01:26like the number of steps that the animation will take--let me make this a lot
01:30smaller, because it does take a little bit of render time to create some of these.
01:36You can control the Direction, some of the Blurriness, Opacity of the Fills as they
01:43animate, and some jitter.
01:46So there are a lot of options and this is like the super-charged way of twisting
01:51and animating objects.
01:52So if you like to animate things, this is a great way to do it.
01:56If you click on this Animate option right there, it's actually going to
01:59create states for you.
02:01So this is something you can use instead of the Standard Animate panel to
02:04create your animations.
02:06So a lot of these eventually will make it into the program itself.
02:11So there are things in here that you might find useful for all kinds of projects.
02:17And you can definitely add your own.
02:19We saw in the previous movie that we could use something called Create Symbol
02:23Script to add functionality to our symbols.
02:26So that's another one that you can use.
02:28You can go to this section here called Manage Extensions, and it'll launch a
02:33separate program called Extension Manager.
02:36And it's just going to read all the tasks right there.
02:39So you could see that all these commands have been added and you can turn
02:42some of these on or off.
02:44If you have other programs, you'll see over here that you can manage the
02:48extensions for those programs as well.
02:51And there is an option of going right here to something called Exchange.
02:55The Exchange is where you get additional commands.
02:58You can search things, so for example, you could do a search for guides and
03:02Search the Exchange and find additional ways of doing things in Fireworks.
03:08Fireworks has a really good API for creating these yourselves.
03:12So it's a little bit out of the scope of this course, but if you want to find
03:16out more, look underneath the Help in the Exchange Forums and you'll get more
03:21information about creating these for Fireworks.
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Adding extensions
00:00There are a lot of really great extensions that are going to expand and enhance Fireworks.
00:04So let's take a look at some other cool and useful extensions you can find and
00:08go through the process of installing them.
00:10So you can find extensions through Fireworks Exchange at this URL.
00:14You might also checkout a couple of web sites that I like for extensions.
00:17This is one from John Dunning, and he has a number of extensions.
00:21A couple of the ones that I really like here are the Placeholder Extension--
00:25and we're going to install that in just a minute--and also this Grids Extension.
00:29So this Placeholder Extension lets you create placeholders that automatically
00:34have the size of the placeholder, and it can also have the location of the
00:38placeholder as well as some text.
00:40So that's just a really nice thing to have when you create mockups.
00:43If you go to another one that he has called Grids, this one lets you create
00:47grids without having to open them up as a template on the fly, and it has a lot
00:51of little options here for some of the grids that you can create, so I love that one.
00:55You can also try this one, and this is actually from Adobe.
00:59So if you go to this URL, you can find the Guides panel Extension.
01:03One of the nice things about this one is that it lets you Copy and Paste guides
01:07between documents or between pages.
01:10It also lets you create guides based on an object.
01:13So if you have a rectangle or a circle or any particular shape, you can have
01:18this extension create some guides automatically for you.
01:20So I like that one as well.
01:22So let's see how you would install some of those.
01:24First we need to go to each one of these pages.
01:26So I'll go to this Placeholder one and find the Download link.
01:30So here's the Download this version and all the extensions are going to be .mxp.
01:35So I'm going to click on that.
01:36It's going to go to my Download Manager, and I'm going to go to Grids, find the
01:40Download link here, click on that, it's going to download it as well.
01:43And I'll come over here and this one is actually Zip, so we'll click on that,
01:49it'll go Download it.
01:51And then I'm going to open up my Downloads folder, so I'll just click on this
01:55icon and open this right here, and it shows me all my Downloads.
01:59So open this folder up, which really one is these mxp Files.
02:04So when you find one that you want to install, all you have to do is
02:07double-click on the file and it will run something called the
02:10Extensions Manager.
02:12Anytime you download an extension, it gives you a warning and a lot of text to
02:17read, so you might want to check that out.
02:18I'm going to click Accept and click OK. So that Guides Extension is already installed.
02:24It's really good to read this notes, it kind of tells you a little bit about
02:26what the extension does.
02:28So we've got that one installed.
02:29I'm going to double-click on this Grids Extension.
02:33It gives me a similar disclaimer there, so I'll hit Accept, and finally go to
02:38Placeholder and also hit Accept.
02:42So this is pretty cool!
02:43You could see it's super-easy to install extensions. All you do is just
02:46double-click on the mxp Files, it runs this piece of software.
02:50Notice how you can install extensions for other software in here as well.
02:53And of course, you can remove the extensions if you no longer want them.
02:56A lot of times when you go in through the extensions, you'll download
02:59something and it might be lame or something, so just hit Remove and no big
03:02deal, no harm done.
03:04That's the cool thing about extensions.
03:06So once you've got them downloaded and installed, you're going to have
03:08to restart Fireworks.
03:09So I'm going to go over to the Fireworks.
03:12So I'm going to make sure that I Quit first, and then I'm going to run it again.
03:18So I'm going to close that and make a New document and I'll just make it 800 by 500.
03:25Extensions can install in different places, so you kind of have to look for
03:29them, that's why it's a good idea to read the instructions when they come in.
03:32So if the Placeholder Extension is a shape, that's going to be under Auto
03:36Shapes, so I'll need to turn that on and scroll through this list until I find it.
03:42Here's the Placeholder Extension right there.
03:44So to use this, all I do is drag this out on to the workspace area and I get
03:49this Window right here.
03:50When I resize this Window, you'll notice that the width and height variables
03:53here automatically update.
03:55So that's kind of cool, you get a box and the boxes tells you the size.
03:59There are a few other options, and you can access those by clicking right here
04:02in this target area.
04:04So I'll just click on that and you can set the Size and Position numerically if
04:08you want to, and you can Show a Label also if you want to.
04:12By default, you can also Show the size and/or the position.
04:15Now unfortunately, when you move this over it's not going to update the position.
04:19To update the position, you'll have to click on this and click OK, and then it
04:23updates the position, or you'll have to perform maybe a slight resize.
04:27It's not really optimal.
04:28So I don't really like to have position on, because you're not going to remember
04:33to do that every time.
04:35But it's kind of nice, you can set the Height and Width here and the X and Y position manually.
04:40And I like having the Label. You can even type in what you want the label to be.
04:44That sometimes kind of cool for creating prototypes.
04:46So guides are a panel, so that would be under Window, and you can scroll down
04:52until you see this thing called Guide.
04:54So it's kind of cool, you can add entire panels with extensions.
04:59And this one doesn't exactly look like the Standard Fireworks Panels.
05:03You can dock it if you want to.
05:04And one of the things that it will let you do is create guides based on a selection.
05:10So you could say, "Hey, I've got a selection here. I want you to create some
05:12guides going through the middle of that selection."
05:15You can also say, "Ah, just give me the top right corner, bottom right corner et cetera, et cetera."
05:20So you could see that you can create guides base on an object.
05:23And that's something that's not available in Fireworks, but I find kind of useful.
05:28So just go back to the General section here.
05:31And in here you can go ahead and Clear the guides.
05:34You can Save some of this guides, you can Copy in between pages, so you could
05:39say, "Hey, let me go ahead and add some guides there."
05:42So I'll go back to Selection, and I've got that selected, so I'll just outline
05:46the selection and then come back to General.
05:49So after this you can go ahead and Copy the Guides.
05:52After you create a page, you can paste this into any master page or Paste Master Guides.
05:59I mean, this is like Guides on steroids.
06:01And if you are one of these people like me who loves Guides and does a lot of
06:06stuff to align things, this is a really cool extension to have.
06:10Grids is similar to Guides. It creates Guides, but it's a command.
06:14So that will be available under the Commands menu.
06:17And if you go to that and select Grids, and you can select Insert Grid and
06:23this is a little pop-up menu here that allows you to set a grid with all of kinds parameters.
06:28So this will be like a grid system. If you're really into laying out web sites
06:32with grids, you can set all your parameters here, the X and Y Origin, the
06:37Widths, how many Columns you have, so you could change the amount of columns,
06:40where the columns start, and all that stuff and then hit OK. And bam!
06:44You've got a really nice Grid System here.
06:47It would take me so much time to just lay out that Grid by hand.
06:51But by having that command, I can do it in a couple seconds.
06:54So if you're proficient with JavaScript, you can also create your own extensions.
06:58And to learn how to do that, you need to go to the Fireworks Development Center,
07:02add this URL, and there's a lot of articles about creating your own extensions
07:07and your own commands.
07:08So if you're into that sort of development, make sure you check out this web page.
07:12Fireworks is a really mature program, and it's hard to believe that you'd ever
07:15want to add anything to it.
07:17But there are some really cool and useful extensions out there.
07:19The ability to add your own makes Fireworks even more powerful.
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Creating commands with the History panel
00:00The History panel is one of Firework's gems.
00:02It records every action you perform within Fireworks, and it also lets you do one little trick.
00:07It allows you to build your own commands based on some of the actions you've performed.
00:11So let's take a look.
00:12I'm going to create a new document, just Command+N or Ctrl+N on a PC, just give
00:16it an 800 by 500 pixel Width and Height, and hit Enter to accept.
00:22And then I'm going to click on this Rectangle tool.
00:25I have the History panel already showing here.
00:27If you don't have that showing, just go to the Window menu and select History.
00:31So now when I draw something on my workspace, the History panel is going to show
00:37me not only what I'm doing, but it's going to record every step.
00:39So I do that Rectangle, and then I'm going to make sure that it's 90 pixels by
00:4490 pixels, so I'll type those values right here.
00:47Notice that it's recording the transformation.
00:49I'm also going to add some Roundness to it, about 25 pixel looks really good.
00:54It recorded that as well.
00:55And I'm going to click on the Pointer tool and click and drag while holding down
01:00the Option key and the Shift key to constrain that movement and let go.
01:06That made a duplicate of the first rounded rectangle.
01:09I hit Command+Y a couple of times.
01:11That just makes some extra copies.
01:13And then I'll select all, Command+A or Ctrl+A on a PC, and I'm going to go to
01:18Align and make sure that this are aligned 15 pixels in between each one of these
01:22elements horizontally, so I'll click on this.
01:25It looks like I did it just right, so it didn't do any adjustment there.
01:29Back to History so you can see what's going on.
01:31I had added a Command Script, and then I'm going group these elements.
01:36There's the Group in the History panel.
01:38Click and drag while holding down the Option key and the Shift key, and then I'm
01:43going to hit Command+Y a couple more times.
01:45On purpose, I made it a little taller than it should be, so Command+A to select
01:50everything, back to Align, and this time I'll space evenly vertically 15 pixels,
01:55and now I got a perfect grid.
01:57I will Command+G to group those items together.
02:01And if I go back to the History panel, scroll this up right here, there's all my
02:06steps to create that perfect grid.
02:09So I use grids a lot in my layouts, so I may want to save this as a command.
02:13To do that, I'm going to click on the first and the last item in this list here,
02:18and I'm holding down the Shift key.
02:20It's going to make sure that I grab all of them.
02:21Then I'm going to hit this button right here, it's called Save steps as a Command.
02:26Click on that and I'm going to give this thing a name, blackgrid.
02:29Just for kicks, I'll not put a space.
02:31Hit OK and that becomes now a command that I can access through the Commands menu.
02:37Here's my blackgrid command.
02:39I'm going to open up a new document, hit Enter, and now if I want to create a
02:45new grid, all I have to do is go to the Commands menu, select this grid, and
02:48there it is, and I can ungroup it a couple of times.
02:51And if I wanted to, I can get rid of the last few pieces of the grid and make a 3 by 3 grid.
02:56So it's really cool, just taking some steps in the History panel, I was able to
03:01create a command that I can use over and over in a lot of my projects.
03:05If you want to get rid of a command, just go to Manage Saved Commands right here
03:09and you can get rid of any of these commands or rename them.
03:12So I'm going to click OK, I don't really want to do anything to it.
03:17Now the History panel is just more powerful than that.
03:20You can back up, like I said, back to any other command.
03:24You can actually delete commands from here, or you can say I want to back up to
03:27the point that I had just this group right here.
03:31And then from here on I want to do something else, so I'm going to do that.
03:34Notice that it gets rid of everything afterwards.
03:37So when you put your position right here, this little marker, anything you
03:41do after that marker will become the new sequence that it stores in the History panel.
03:45You don't have to copy a contiguous group of elements from this list.
03:50You can hit the Command key and just copy some of the commands.
03:54Sometimes some of these commands are not really necessary for the command that
03:58you're saving, so you just Command-click on the ones that you want to save, and
04:02then you can save those as a command.
04:04You can also copy steps to the clipboard.
04:07You can also apply any sort of filter, any sort of lines.
04:11So anything you can save as a history item is going to be available to you to
04:15save as a command, and that's going to let you build some really powerful stuff very easily.
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Using batch commands
00:00If you need to make some common changes to files like resizing a folder full of
00:03images or add a custom command you've built with the History panel, you can use
00:07the Batch command under the File menu to make things easier.
00:10So if you go the File menu and select Batch Process--and I'm going to go to
00:15the Desktop, find the Exercise Files folder, and find the folder for this
00:19movie. You'll see that I have a couple of folders there. One of them has got
00:24pictures of some artwork.
00:26They're pretty big. They're just whatever we got from the artists.
00:30So I want to go ahead and resize all of those files.
00:33I could do that one by one, open each file and then resize them manually, but
00:38it's nice that this program allows you to do something in batch.
00:41So hit this Add All button right here.
00:43I can also just Shift-click or Command- click, Ctrl-click on a PC, to select them.
00:48But I'll just hit Add All, it adds all the files, and then I'm going to hit this Next button.
00:53Here I can perform a number of Batch commands.
00:55You could see that there is an Export command, Scale command, and you can even
01:00have stuff from the Commands menu.
01:02So you can add things that you've created yourself here or add any of these
01:07other options, say you want to rotate the photos.
01:09This is probably why those commands exist in the Commands menu like you might be
01:13wondering why would I need a command to rotate something in 180 degrees?
01:18Well, that's because you can do that to a whole batch of photos with the Batch command.
01:22So what I want to do here is Scale, and so I'll Add this command to be
01:27included in the Batch.
01:28And underneath the Scale, I have some options that I can choose.
01:32So I want to Scale to Fit Area to make sure that my photos fit within a specific
01:37size, and I'll do 600 Pixels wide so this is the maximum width and height.
01:42So I want the photos to end up being no wider than 600 pixels and no taller than 600 pixels.
01:49You can also choose to only scale documents currently larger than the target
01:52size if you want to.
01:54And then I can do another option which is Export, and I'm going to hit Add over here.
01:59Now, I have the option of exporting the graphics in a specific file format, so I
02:05could say I want these as JPEG - Better Quality, and you can hit Edit and have
02:09more control over how everything is saved.
02:12This option is fine for me right now.
02:13So these are the commands that I'm executing.
02:16You can move the command around if you want something to happen
02:19before something else.
02:21You can kind of move them around with these arrows.
02:23This is fine, I want to scale, and then I want to export.
02:25As you could see, it could get really complicated here and any of these other
02:28ones, but these are the two that I need.
02:30So I'm just going hit Next, and then you can choose to output to the same
02:36location as an original file, output a custom location, and whether or not you
02:42want to overwrite existing backups.
02:44So you can actually have it back up some other versions of the file.
02:47I want to choose Custom location, and then as a custom location, I'll just
02:51put them on the Desktop, so I'll hit Choose and the Backups option is gone right now.
02:56Notice that you can also save the script.
02:58So I'm going to save that, resizeimages, put it on the Desktop as well just so
03:04that it's easy for me to find, and I'll hit Save, and then I'll hit the Batch
03:08button and it'll go to town here in a second.
03:11There is the file that I saved, and there it is processing each of the
03:15images, saving them to an appropriate dimension, and I'll hit OK and it takes me back here.
03:23But you could see that now it's created all these images and it's resized
03:27them to a nice size that I can use for the web that is no taller and no wider than 600 pixels.
03:33A lot of times you get a ton of photos, and they're all shot in--now the cameras
03:37are up to like 20 Megapixels and you really want them to be 20 Megapixels.
03:41I've seen humongous photos online.
03:44We want to be able to just compress them to something at least more workable.
03:47We could use this kind of command to create something that is a script that you
03:51can use when you're batch-processing photos.
03:53If you want to do this again, all you've got to do is double-click on this.
03:56Notice that it immediately brings this up, what do you want to process?
03:59So you could hit this button, find the folder for this movie, and I'm going to
04:06click on artists here, and I can batch-process these guys as well.
04:12And if I hit OK, it's going to go through and process those.
04:16Now I might have a problem because my photos happened to be named exactly the
04:20same, so I probably wanted to move those. Let's see what it's doing.
04:26See, it actually replaced my other ones.
04:28So it would have been a good idea to put everything in a folder before I did the
04:31second batch, the artists and their art are named exactly the same thing.
04:36So I'll replace them, but you could see that this is really pretty cool and
04:39useful, and it would be nice if I could add this resizeimages command somewhere
04:44where I could get to it again.
04:45So to do that, I'm going to search for something in the Batch Commands folder.
04:50So I know that I have added a command, if you've watched the previous movie on
04:54creating commands with the History panel called blackgrid.
04:56So what I'll do is I will do a Command+F, which is how you find things on a
05:01Mac, I'm just going to type in the extension .jsf, and it looks like it finds a lot of them.
05:07So let's see.
05:08I'm going to click on one of these.
05:09It looks like it finds the Adobe Fireworks CS6 folder, Configuration, Auto Shape Tools.
05:16So these are kind of hard to find.
05:17They're in different places on the Mac and PC.
05:20So if you could do a search for .jsf extension, it'd probably be quicker to find it that way.
05:25So I'm going to double-click on this Configuration folder and there's all the
05:29different things that I can add to Fireworks.
05:32I can double-click on these Commands and look for this Batch Commands
05:36section right here.
05:37This is the folder I want to put that resizeimages.jsf.
05:41And then I'm going to drag that in here.
05:44I'm going to need to restart Fireworks in order for that command to be available to me.
05:49So let me go ahead and quit, and I'll restart Fireworks.
05:55Okay, and I'm going to go ahead and put these in a folder, and I'll do the
06:04art the second time.
06:06So back over here, there's Commands, there's Batch Commands, and here's my resizeimages.
06:12So if I choose that, it immediately brings that up.
06:15The nice thing about it is I don't have to have it somewhere in a
06:18Documents folder now.
06:19It's always within all of the other commands that Fireworks automatically puts
06:24in this little menu.
06:25So I'm going to say Files to Process, I'll say Custom here, and I will find my
06:31Desktop folder, Exercise Files, find the art folder again, and select all these,
06:40click on Open, hit OK, and it's going to process it now.
06:46Once it's done, click OK, and there they are on the Desktop.
06:50I can create another folder and put those in there.
06:56That becomes a personal command that I can use over and over in all of my projects.
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8. Using Sprites
Understanding sprites
00:00One of the great features in Fireworks is the ability to export sprites.
00:04Before I show you how to work with sprites though, you might be asking
00:07yourself, what is a sprite?
00:09Sprites are a technique where a designer or developer combines many images on a
00:12web site into a single image.
00:14This has the effect of reducing the number of requests your page makes for information.
00:19As a result, your pages will load quicker, and you'll reduce the load on your server.
00:24Even with the best compression software, an individual image has a little bit of
00:28information overhead, information about the file, colors used in the document, et cetera.
00:33When you export a lot of slices, that extra overhead adds up quickly.
00:37When you multiply that overhead by the many users making page requests, usually
00:41for the same graphics, it can be dramatic.
00:44Also, when you slice rollover images, the server requests the rollover states
00:48only when needed, and sometimes that can cause a little bit of a flicker.
00:52When the file is saved as a single sprite, all the states for your graphics get
00:56loaded at the same time.
00:57Every request for a file adds an additional load and overhead to your server
01:01since the browser has to ask for every file.
01:04Those additional requests can also be slowed down by the network's slow
01:08connection, adding up to the overhead for each additional file.
01:11It is estimated that loading assets other than the HTML can take 70%-90% of
01:17the time it takes to load up a page, even on popular sites like Google or Yahoo and eBay.
01:21So let's take a look at how this is going to work on a simple page.
01:25So I've got a couple of pages loaded up in my browser here, and they look identical.
01:30So if click on this tab, you can see that we've got a page with our artists and
01:35when you roll over each of the artists' name, you can see their artwork.
01:39Same thing is happening on this tab.
01:40They look exactly the same.
01:42One of them is using sprites--which is this one right here--and the other one is using slices.
01:47They don't look any different, but let me show you how the browser sees them and
01:51how the server sees the requests that get sent for images from the browser.
01:55So I'm going to go to the Develop menu.
01:57If you don't have this menu up on your screen, I want to go to Safari and go to
02:01Preferences, then go to the Advanced tab, which is the last tab right here.
02:04Make sure you've got this option on, Show Develop menu in menu bar.
02:08That allows you to see this particular menu that we have right here.
02:12Once you've got that menu, you want to go to Show web Inspector.
02:16So the web Inspector is going to show you information about the page.
02:19I'd like to dock my web Inspector onto the page, so I'm going to click this
02:23right here, and then I'm going to do the same thing for the other tab.
02:26So Develop > Show Web Inspector, and I'm going to dock it by clicking right here.
02:31What you want to do is you want to go to one of these tabs, and after you've got
02:35this docked and ready to go. You want to reload this page.
02:38You're going to see the client make a request to a server that has this
02:42information, and you're going to see how long it takes for the client to receive
02:46the request back from the server.
02:48So the client is taking a long time making the request due to Internet slowdown
02:52to see all of those time kind of wasted here waiting for the server to reply.
02:55And then, when the server sends back the information, you can see that it gets
02:58here really quick because this is a really small file.
03:01So you can see that happening three times for a total of 247 milliseconds, there
03:06has been three requests, and you have a total of 1.21 kilobytes transferred.
03:11Let's take a look at this page with slices, and we'll do the same thing.
03:14Just come over here and we'll just refresh the page, and you could see already
03:18that this one makes a lot more requests than the previous page.
03:22It took longer, 2.12 seconds, as opposed to just milliseconds on the previous page.
03:27It's also a lot bigger, 2.87 kilobytes, and this is just a very tiny file.
03:32So you could see that reducing the amount of requests is already making a big impact.
03:36The other thing is some of these graphics haven't even loaded.
03:39Some of these graphics won't load until I roll over them, and if this is the
03:42first time you roll over a file, you could see maybe a little flicker there and
03:46you saw some of the images loading up a little bit after I did the rollover.
03:50So somebody's images didn't even load until 28 seconds after the original request.
03:55It loaded pretty quickly, you can see that that can add up on a large web site.
03:58So this one is using regular slices, which means I have a different version of
04:02each one of these images twice because I have rollovers.
04:05And this one is using just one single file.
04:08The difference is super-dramatic, even on these very small files.
04:12So learning how to use CSS Sprites is going to save you a lot of time. You can
04:16reduce the amount of requests, and just think, every time you request an item on
04:20a server, that is an HTTP request.
04:22So just reducing the amount of requests, if you don't do anything else at all,
04:26that's going to save you a ton of time and speed up everything on your site.
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Creating symbols for sprites
00:00Creating Sprites in Fireworks CS6 is a pretty straightforward process.
00:04First, you will need to use the Slice tool to define the shape of the objects
00:07you want to include in your Sprite, and then you export the Sprites.
00:11If you're using Sprites for rollovers, this is one place where a little bit of
00:14forethought is going to make your life easier later.
00:16So let's take a look.
00:17So I'm going to go to my Pages and switch over to my Artists page, because I
00:23already have some photos here that have Slices already on top them.
00:29So what you can do to export a Sprite-sheet is simply just click on each one of these images.
00:34So I'm holding down the Shift key with the Pointer tool to select a bunch of images.
00:40And once I got all of them, I'm going to go to the File menu and select Export.
00:47From here I'm going to choose Export CSS Sprites, and I want to make sure that I
00:52have only the Current Page selected, or it will try to export all the pages.
00:56And also, to have Selected Slices Only so that it doesn't export any
01:00other slices on the page.
01:02And then I'm going to click on Options and this where I define my options for a slice.
01:06Here you can choose whether you want a class or an id Selector for your CSS.
01:11It really depends on how you've organized your page. So it's up to you.
01:15You can include a Prefix so that it prefixes every single name of every slice
01:20with whatever you have here.
01:21So if you do something like ic_, it will prefix the name of each class with ic_
01:27and then the name of the Slice, and then you can add some Padding.
01:31This will allow you to space out the images.
01:34So I have 100 Pixels right here.
01:36If you're doing a certain type of layout, you want to make sure that you give
01:40your items enough space in between them so that if you have objects that are
01:43very tall, for example, you won't see any icons underneath the current icon.
01:48So here you can choose whether you have a Horizontal, Vertical, or a Grid Layout.
01:53If you're doing, say, a list of images that are links that are on top of each
01:57other, then you should choose Vertical.
01:59If you're doing a horizontal menu type element, then you can choose Horizontal.
02:04You can also choose a Preset right here for how the file will be compressed.
02:08So you can use PNG32, usually what you want to use, except this is a bunch of
02:12photos, so a JPEG works a little bit better.
02:15You can try a better quality or smaller file, it doesn't really matter.
02:18These pictures are so small that it's not going to make a huge difference.
02:21So I'll choose JPEG - Better Quality, and I'm going to click OK, and I'll just
02:26save these on the Desktop.
02:27So I'll hit Export. And if it tells you this, just go ahead and say OK.
02:32And I'm going to show you in the Desktop the two files that it generated.
02:37So this is the artists.jpg file, and there it is.
02:40Because this file has different states, it creates a state for the normal
02:45version of the image and then a state for the piece of artwork that is on the second state.
02:50Notice that it did that for all of the images right here, which is kind of nice.
02:54Let's take a look at this CSS file though.
02:57So if I open that up and hitting the spacebar on the Mac to preview it, you can
03:01see the main artists CSS class is right here, that looks great, but underneath
03:06all this is a little bit hard to figure out what it's supposed to be.
03:09That's because we didn't name any of the classes so these all have names
03:13generated by Fireworks.
03:14This is one of the images, and underneath you can see this is the second state
03:19of the image, it's called _1 with the same name.
03:22And if we looked at the photos, you would see that they're in the order that the
03:26photos are right here, but still, it's really hard to figure that out and it
03:30will be horrible to try to use the CSS in this way.
03:32So I'm going to show you a better way of organizing these.
03:34I'm going to go back into Fireworks.
03:37And so what I want to do is I want to copy these images and create a new
03:40document where these images are organized like buttons or as button symbols and
03:46then use those button symbols to have Fireworks generate the code for us
03:50automatically, so it does a much better job.
03:53So I'm going to go over to layers and hide my web layer, and I'm going to copy
03:58all of these photos.
04:01And it looks like I have some lines in between, so it will be better to just
04:03Click and Shift-click them, until I have all of them.
04:11So there I have all of them.
04:12Now, I'm going to copy them, so Edit > Copy, and I'm going to create a new
04:16document, File > New, and I'm just going to give myself a pretty big document
04:21here, 800x500, hit OK.
04:24That makes a New document.
04:25I want to grab the tab, and I'm going to put it right beside the current document
04:29in between the current document and the Panels area right here.
04:33That puts the document side by side.
04:35And I'm scrolling over to the left side and I'm going to paste my images there.
04:39So let's see, I want to kind of align them, so I'm going to just pick a few
04:46of them and I want to make sure these are kind of in the order that they are supposed to be.
04:50So they don't have to be perfect.
04:52I'm going to align them in just a minute.
04:57And you might have to zoom out a lot to get these last three.
05:01They're a little bit underneath.
05:02You can make a selection even outside the workspace.
05:06You will have workspaces by doing a normal selection in that area, so there's
05:10the images in relative order, and then I'm going to come over here and look for
05:16my art, which luckily, is right next to these images.
05:19I'll just grab all these and copy and just paste them over here.
05:29And what I want to do is just have them be aligned.
05:34Definitely make sure these are aligned perfectly, and then I can create my symbols.
05:38So I'll spend some time aligning these.
05:40I'll position this one at 00 position.
05:44And to align these, what I'll do is I'll click on each of these three, and then
05:48I'm going to align these, I think, to the bottom, because the bottom ones are
05:52aligned where I want them to be.
05:53And I want the spacing to be 0 pixels between each one.
05:57So I'll click on this and I can see that my Width is 270, which is what I want
06:02and my Height is 90, and it's positioned at 00 in my Properties panel.
06:06So I know these are perfectly aligned now, and I'll just do the same thing for all these.
06:11So I'm going to Group each row, selecting these three and hitting Command+G or Ctrl+G on a PC.
06:21And I'm just going to make sure that these are all also aligned vertically.
06:25So I'm selecting all three of these and make sure I click on space evenly,
06:290 pixels and I know these are all perfect.
06:31I can see that by looking at this Width and Height here, it's 270x270.
06:35So now that all that is ready, I need to do the same thing over here.
06:38So now these are all done. I'm ungrouping both of these.
06:43So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make symbol out of each one of these and
06:47then for each one of these photos, I'm going to create a second state and put
06:52the alternate version or the artwork for each person in that symbol for the
06:57second state, which will be the over state.
06:59So for this guy, I will go ahead and right-click on him, Convert to Symbol, and
07:04this will be a button symbol.
07:05It doesn't really matter what name I give him.
07:07It matters what the name of the instance will be, but it's not going to matter
07:12what name I give him here.
07:13You can, if you want to be more careful about the symbol names, but it's
07:16not going to matter.
07:17So I'm just going to hit OK, and there I created a button symbol. And what I want
07:22to do is I want to take this piece of art here and I'm going to cut it,
07:26double-click on the button symbol, go on to the States panel, choose the Over
07:31State, paste, and just make sure that that is in the correct spot, which will be
07:36right there, then double-click and just do the same thing for all these.
07:40It's going to take me a while to get it done, so.
07:44Okay. So I have all of my Buttons created.
07:46Each button has a Second State, and on the Second State I have the alternate
07:50version that shows the artwork that each artist has created.
07:54The next thing you want to do is you want to name each of these Buttons, and this
07:58is what's going to help you when it generates the CSS, because it's going to use
08:02the names that you used here to generate your CSS code.
08:05So what I want to do is just rename each of these Buttons the name of each person.
08:11So I have the ames on this other page right here.
08:14So let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit.
08:18And I will just copy the Name and paste it into the proper symbol here.
08:25So I'm back on this document, and I'll click on the button symbol, and I'll go
08:29ahead and paste the name here.
08:31I usually take away like any spaces, and if somebody has a name like Jonathan
08:36here, I'm just going to use the first name and the last name.
08:39So I will just call that Jonathan Ferrar.
08:40For Hillary Hewitt Goldwynn-Post, I'll just use Hillary Goldwynn, just to
08:45make my life easier.
08:46So I'll use the First Name, Last Name, I will capitalize, but I won't use any
08:50spaces in between the names.
08:51So I'm going to do that for all these. I got the name.
08:53I'm going to hit Enter.
08:56Okay, so now that I have all of them finished, make sure that you've got every
09:00single one of them named properly, no spaces or weird characters in between, and
09:06make sure you don't have any that are not named.
09:08Sometimes it's hard to get the names just right, and it will try to rename it
09:11automatically for you.
09:13So once you've got them all named properly, then I'm going to go ahead and go to
09:18the Modify menu and just trim all that white space by going to Modify Canvas >
09:22Trim Canvas. It gets rid of all the white space.
09:26I know that I'm going to want this icons to be pretty tiny, so I'm going to the
09:29Modify menu > Canvas and select Image Size.
09:32And I want to pick 96 Pixels by 96 Pixels and hit OK.
09:38That's going to make each of our Slices 32 Pixels Wide by 32 Pixels Tall.
09:43And now we are ready to export this.
09:46So we'll go to the File menu and once again select Export.
09:48From here, we'll do Export CSS Sprites again. I just want the Current Page.
09:53We're going to do Selected Slices Only because you don't have any slices
09:57selected, and this particular document only has the Slices we want to export.
10:02So we're going to click on Options here. We're going to use class.
10:06We'll use the ic Prefix once again. Leave these settings just as they were.
10:10Under pixel Padding, Vertical Layout, JPEG - Better Quality Optimization, so all that is fine.
10:15And I'm going to hit OK and I'll just call it artists.jpg,
10:21and I'll just let it overwrite the files on the Desktop.
10:23So I'll hit Export, it already exists, you want to continue and replace, Yes,
10:28Yes, and now we'll take a look at the JPEG file.
10:32It's going to be the same as before.
10:34However, the CSS file is going to look a lot nicer.
10:37Notice that it used the first class here, the artists class, to define our JPEG
10:43and the generic position for a JPEG.
10:45But on each of these other classes, it generated the class with the name already
10:50in the class name and it generated a Hover State because this time we generated
10:54Buttons and Buttons give you that automatically Hover Position, instead of the
10:59weird name we were getting before.
11:00So as you can see, generating Sprites and the CSS for them is super easy with
11:05Fireworks, especially if you spend a little bit of time setting up your
11:08documents with button symbols when you want to do Hover States.
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Exporting sprite CSS
00:00I want to show you how to prepare an HTML page using Sprites generated from Fireworks.
00:04This is a file that has been set up for exporting to Sprites.
00:10You can see that there are different icons or different little symbols for each
00:13one of these people, these different artists.
00:15And if I double-click on one of these artists--you got to be careful not to
00:19double-click in the middle, so I'm going to load it, double-click--
00:22you can see that every artist has two states:
00:25a Regular State, or an Up State, and an Over State that is a sample piece of art
00:30from their collection.
00:31So they're all set up like that.
00:33I'm going to go back to Page 01 here, and they're ready to be exported as a Sprite.
00:38So I'm going to go to the File menu and select Export.
00:41And from this Export menu, I can choose CSS Sprites from this pop-up, and then
00:47I'm going to need to check Options here.
00:49So before I do that, I'm going to go to the Desktop and make myself a site
00:52folder, I'll call it site, Create, and I'm going to hit Options here.
00:58I need to set up my options for exporting.
01:01What I want to do is set up a class.
01:03My class is going to be Prefixed by an ic_ so that whenever it saves, the CSS is
01:10going to include an ic_ at the beginning of each class name and then the Name of
01:15each one of the slices or the symbols that I have created.
01:19Then I need to consider how I want to add my Padding.
01:21This is going to be a vertical list of links, so I want to add enough Padding so
01:26that I never see two photos even if my links get really tall.
01:30So 100 Pixels works really well for this.
01:33My Layout, since this is going to be a list of links, that it's going to be Vertical.
01:35It's going to be Vertical.
01:37And the Optimization Preset is just how I want to save the images.
01:41These are photos, so I think JPEG - Better Quality will work fine.
01:45You can also use JPEG - Smaller Size, but that's not going to make a huge
01:48difference since this is such a small photo.
01:50So I'm going to hit OK.
01:51There's my site folder, CSS Sprites, I'm going to hit Export, and it's going to export my file.
02:00Here's the site folder, and I have my CSS as well as my JPEG file right there.
02:05And my JPEG file is going to be just the icon separated 100 Pixels from each
02:09other, and each State is also going to be in that file as well.
02:12So I'll close this out.
02:14My CSS is just going to be referencing each one of those.
02:18Notice that each one of my Slices was named after the artist name, so it added
02:22the ic_ at the beginning of each one of those.
02:26And everything looks really good. So let me go ahead and copy my index.
02:31html file so that I can build my web site.
02:36And now I'm going to open up the CSS file and the index.
02:39html file in a text editor.
02:42I'm using Espresso, so I'm holding down the Option key and clicking on the
02:46Preview button, so I can see a live preview over here to the right.
02:51So what I need to do is in my index file, I need to call my CSS, so I'm going to
02:56add a link tag, with a relation of stylesheet and allocation of the file, so
03:03this will be--it's right on top over here, so artistsicons.css.
03:09I don't need this type, so I'll get rid of it.
03:11And I need to save it. Okay.
03:15In addition to that, I'm just going to make these a little bigger.
03:21I'm going to need to add a class to my unordered list.
03:25And the class is going to be the main class for the image, so it's' going to be
03:29artistsicons and you can see that one of them pops up.
03:33That's because this is an unordered list, so this is the entire list right here
03:37and this list is not tall enough to show two of these icons, it's just showing
03:41you the first one right here.
03:42And then what I need to do is under each list item, I also need to add a class,
03:48and the class is going to be ic_ and then the Name of the artist.
03:52It's easier just to copy them from here, so here's my CSS that was generated by Fireworks.
03:59So I could try to type everything.
04:01I named everything pretty well, so I know that it's going to be the first and
04:04last name, capital letters included.
04:06So I could do that, but it's just easier to copy the names.
04:09So I know this is Barot here, so I'll just copy this one and the class will be
04:14that, then the next one, again, a class here, and this is going to be Jonathan
04:21right here, so paste that.
04:26So this is all I need for the HTML.
04:29I'm going to save this, and then I can close out of it.
04:32You can see that it's really nice Fireworks wrote the Hover code for us
04:36automatically, because we had created those individual slices as button
04:42rollovers, it automatically generated this Hover code which is really, really nice.
04:46So if you're going to use rollovers, make sure that you use symbols that are
04:50buttons, because it will automatically take care of that code.
04:52So we can take a look at our code right here.
04:55There is going to be some adjustments that we need to make to the CSS file as well.
04:58So let's take care of those next.
05:00So we'll start off by creating just some modifications to an unordered list.
05:05And what I want to do here is I'll get rid of the bullets, so I'll list down
05:11none, and I'll get rid of the margin and the padding that normally appears on
05:15those, so zero those out as well.
05:18And then I'm going to make some changes here to the artisticons.
05:22So I'm going to go ahead and put them on multiple lines so that they're easier to read.
05:27And what I want to do here is add an unordered list at the beginning as well as a list item.
05:33So I'm modifying each one of these list items, not just the entire artist
05:38icon unordered list.
05:40So I'll go ahead and do that, and what I want to do is add a little padding to
05:44the left, and it's going to be 40 Pixels.
05:46So I'm just going to scoot them over a little bit to the right and add a little
05:51bit of padding at the bottom, just to give it some breathing room, 10 Pixels.
05:56I'll change the font, just make it normal, and I'll use 1.6 ems here.
06:03Everything else looks pretty good.
06:06And finally, I need to add an unordered list, list item to each of these.
06:10And you can see that as soon as I code it, you will see the icon appear over
06:14here on the right-hand side.
06:16So every one of these list items is going to have this style by default,
06:21including the background at a normal position, which will be top left, bottom right.
06:25You can't see them right now out, because, remember, they are 100 Pixels down
06:29from the top of each list item.
06:31So you're not going to be able to see them unless you apply this secondary
06:35sub-style here, which tells each item that has the class of the individual
06:40person and it gives it the background position that you need here.
06:43So all we need to do to modify this is just add--let me see if I can make it
06:47bigger, so you could see it all in one line, because it's easier that way, and
06:51then I'll scoot this over just over here.
06:54And so, all we need to do is just add those and you'll see them up here on the
07:00right-hand side as soon as I add them.
07:04And the Hover should start working now.
07:06So as I hover over these elements, you'll see the preview of the artwork appear as well.
07:11We'll paste those in and all of our art is working.
07:19Everything is really constrained.
07:20The reason for that is because of the way Fireworks is writing its code.
07:24It's automatically given us a width here of 32 Pixels by 32 Pixels.
07:30So if you look at what it's doing, every list item is going to have a width of 32x32 Pixels.
07:36Sometimes that's what you want when you're doing a sprite sheet, but
07:38sometimes it's not.
07:39So I'm just going to take out all the widths and heights, so I'll just cut
07:42that one out and I'll do a Find for that and then Replace it with nothing, so I'll hit Command+F.
07:49Most text editors will have some sort of Find/Replace feature, so I'll just
07:53take all those widths and heights out and you can see that my list is looking really good.
07:59Everything is hovering properly, and our navigational list is working pretty well.
08:03So you're always going to have to modify some of the CSS that Fireworks
08:07generates, but you can see that it was really no big deal, just some standard
08:11code applied to this page.
08:13It did a really good job of creating this Sprite Graphic, as well as most of the CSS for you.
08:18So remember that when you're working with Sprites that have rollovers, I
08:21recommend that you use button symbols, working with the Symbols means that
08:25you'll get a Hover CSS written for you, and it makes just adding a Sprite Sheet
08:30or a Sprite into your HTML and your CSS just a piece of cake.
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9. CSS Integration
Using CSS tools in the Object panel
00:00Fireworks has some excellent CSS workflow features built into the program.
00:05I'm going to show you some of the things that you can do in Fireworks to use CSS
00:09or to prepare your CSS for you web projects.
00:12Some of them are going to seem kind of small, but they're very useful.
00:15So one of the new things is if you go to any of the color palettes like this
00:21fill palette right here, you could see that we have the ability to get the
00:23current color or set the current color in either Hexadecimal or RGB colors.
00:28You'll notice that there is a little button to the right of each of these fields
00:33that allows you to copy that Hexadecimal or RGB colors.
00:36If I click right here and click on any text tool, and I'll just type in
00:42some text there and I'm going to paste, you can see that we get that Hexadecimal color.
00:47And if we copy this one, we can paste an RGB color.
00:55Now, you can also access colors down here from the Properties panel, so let me
00:59go ahead and find something.
01:02Let me go ahead and draw a rectangle, and you can access color from these little
01:07quick menus right here.
01:09And if you click on one of these and you set any color, you'll see that we can
01:13also change the Opacity of that color, and I want to change the Opacity to 50%.
01:18That makes the color partially transparent.
01:21If I go over here and now I copy the RGB color--not the Hexadecimal, but the
01:27RGB--and then I'm going to paste it somewhere, instead of getting RGB, I get the
01:33RGBA mode which is what a CSS program will use for transparency, and it writes it
01:39up properly red, green and blue value, plus the Opacity setting right here.
01:44So that's available to you from the panels.
01:48So click on this, you can see it right here.
01:50You can also see that we have Opacity for a Stroke if we want to.
01:54The same kind of commands, if we want to copy a color, we can copy it from right here.
01:59If you choose a color that has opacity, you will automatically get an RGBA
02:05instead of an RGB color.
02:06So that is really useful when you want to just jump in and grab a color from
02:11this right here, and find out what the Hexadecimal or RGB values are or perhaps
02:16you're trying to type in a Hex value or an RGB value to see what it's going to
02:21like, you can do that and from right there.
02:23The other option is the Eyedropper tool. Eyedropper tool is for picking colors.
02:28One cool feature about the Eyedropper tool is that if you right-click anywhere,
02:33you will be able to copy this color.
02:35And if you choose an object that has a Fill, you can Copy the Fill Color.
02:39If the object also has a Stroke, you can Copy the Stroke Color.
02:42So I'm going to choose Copy Color, because I just clicked on part of this artwork
02:47right here, and then when I click and just paste that, it's going to give me the
02:52Hexadecimal value for that.
02:53I just want to set it up so that it gives you an RGB color.
02:58You just need to click on the Eyedropper tool by itself, and then come over here
03:02to Color Format and select RGBA.
03:05So now, when I copy something like this blue right here, and then I really need
03:11to make sure I got that properly here, so click on this, Color Format is RGBA
03:18and I'm going to right-click, Copy Color, and then I will just paste it and
03:24there is the RGB value right there.
03:27It's not RGBA, because it doesn't have transparency.
03:29Again, it's only going to use RGBA if the color has transparency.
03:33That's actually really useful.
03:34A lot of times, you're just trying to figure out what the RGB values or the
03:38Hexadecimal values of a color are in your CSS, and Fireworks really does a great
03:42job of giving you those options pretty quick.
03:45There's also an entire CSS Properties panel, and it's right here.
03:49You can pull that up and this is a context-sensitive panel.
03:53I'm going to go ahead and dock it right here so that we can see it update as
03:57we click on things.
03:59If you click on any element on the workspace, you can see that the CSS
04:02properties panel shows you things about that element.
04:05So, for example, it's showing us what the font size is and all these
04:08other properties there.
04:09So if we grab a rectangle, and I'll just draw something right here, and I'm
04:15going to create a gradient.
04:18Now we've got a gradient selected.
04:20Notice that the CSS Properties panel actually give us the code for that gradient.
04:24So there is a Property values area right here.
04:27It's also showing us the Width and Height of this element, and if you come
04:30down here, you could see that it's writing all the code for us, including
04:33code for multiple browsers.
04:35So that's, including the browser prefixes for CSS that you could use on a real project.
04:40You can choose down here which browsers you're targeting.
04:43Really, there's no reason not to target all of them.
04:46You should always target all browsers, but this is kind of a nice feature you
04:49can choose to include comments or not.
04:52This is smaller code when you turn it off, so unless you really want to see
04:56which browsers you're targeting, it's better just to turn this Comments off.
05:00And also, click on these icons right here.
05:03If you click on Copy All, it will copy all the properties and give you some CSS.
05:07Let me just do that right now.
05:08I'll hit Copy All, and then I'm just going to paste.
05:11I'll click on something else to deselect, and then I'll just paste.
05:14You could see that it's giving you a ton of code, something that you can use
05:18with a text editor or a CSS editor.
05:20You could see that it's giving you not only the code for the background image or
05:25the gradients, but also the Width and Height here as well.
05:31You can selectively pick specific things that you want it to do, so you can
05:35click on just a gradient and then hit this button and that just copies the selected elements.
05:41So if I just click on the Width right here and copy the selected element,
05:45and then when I paste, all I will get will be a Width parameter that I can use in CSS.
05:51So it's pretty cool.
05:53One really nice thing about the CSS Properties panel is that it does an
05:57excellent job in writing things like Drop Shadows and Inner Glows and stuff like that.
06:02So if I add a Drop Shadow--and I'm going to adjust my Drop Shadow here, and you
06:08can see my Drop Shadow happening right there.
06:11There is the Box Shadow. If I then go and add an Inner Shadow here or an Inner
06:15Glow--I'll go and select Inner Glow, and we will give it nice feather touch
06:22here, and I'll go ahead and color it like red a little bit, so it's just kind of a subtle effect.
06:32So I will click somewhere else here and you could barely see that it added a
06:36little bit of code right there.
06:37So if we can make this bigger, you can see that it added both that regular Drop
06:41Shadow piece of code, as well as the inset code for the Inner Glow.
06:46So it does a really nice job of writing the CSS for you.
06:50And a lot of times, you don't really want this Width and Height, because you
06:53just want the style of this element, so you can Click and then Command-click to
06:57select a non-contiguous group of elements, and then you can just Copy-select it
07:02and then paste that code into your favorite CSS editor.
07:05So you could see that Fireworks makes it a lot easier, not only to get colors
07:10from different places, but also generates a little bit of CSS code for you that
07:15can help you be a little bit quicker.
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Working with the CSS Properties panel
00:00So I want to show you how to prepare an HTML File using code from the
00:04CSS Properties panel.
00:06So CSS Properties panel--if it's not showing, you can go to Windows menu and you
00:10can select CSS Properties.
00:12What I'm going to do is I'll dock it right here in the middle between the Panels
00:17and this document, so we could see it side by side.
00:19Whenever I click on an item and the CSS Properties panel is on, it's going to
00:24show me information about that item.
00:26So if I click on this text right here, it'll show me some text information.
00:30If I click on something else like a graphic, it's going to show me
00:33information about that graphic.
00:34What I want to grab is this navigation.
00:36That happens to be in the Master Page called Layout right now.
00:40So I'll click on the Master Page to get into that and then if I click on
00:44this navigation, I'll be able to see the gradient information and the Width
00:47and Height for this.
00:49Usually the most complicated thing on a web site is generating the CSS code for gradients.
00:54That's because different browsers use different prefixes for each gradient and
00:58the code can get really gnarly.
00:59So it's super nice that Fireworks writes all that for you in a number of
01:05different browsers so that you could just copy and paste your code from within
01:09Fireworks once you generate any gradient.
01:11You could see that I have a gradient selected here and over here I can see all
01:15the code that it will write.
01:17One of the options here is to include comments if you want to see what browsers
01:20these different versions are supporting, you can turn that on.
01:24Really after a while, you're probably going to keep it off because you're not
01:26really going to use it for anything.
01:28You can copy parts of this code from this area in the Window right here, or you
01:32could just click on an element or click on an element or property that you want
01:36to copy and then just Click on Copy Selected right here at the bottom. You can
01:41copy all, but most of the time you'll be doing Copy Selected.
01:44So let's go ahead and apply that on to a page.
01:46So here is my HTML. Let's just go over what HTML I have here.
01:51Simple HTML5 page, it's linking to my CSS Stylesheet right here, and in the
01:59main area I have a header section. The header section is a nav tag that has a
02:05list inside the nav tag.
02:07Now I've added this class here called group because I am floating these
02:12elements right here, so each one of these list items would normally display as a bulleted list.
02:17So in order to make them display side by side like this, I have to float them.
02:21Whenever I do that, unfortunately the container loses track of the height of
02:26any items within them.
02:28So because of that I've added this class called group and I've coded this little
02:34group fix or a clear fix as it is sometimes called, take care of that problem.
02:38So if I took this out you could see that my Navigation Bar disappears from the sides.
02:43It's still there, but it's not taken into account the height of the items within them.
02:47So if I added a height here and say, I added 10 pixels, you could see that it's
02:51still there, but it's just sort of collapsed.
02:53Once I float items inside an element, if I don't take care of this with this
03:00code, then it's going to forget what the height of these items are supposed to be.
03:04So that's what that's there for.
03:05Then we have a simple navigation, we give a width of 100%, so it's the whole
03:09width of the browser. Background color right now that's temporary. We're going
03:13to switch over to nice gradient in just a minute.
03:15And then we have the list items, we'll clear at the margin and the padding, get
03:19rid of the bullets and position it a little bit over from the left-hand side,
03:2450 pixels so that it doesn't appear right here, it's moved in a little bit
03:2850 pixels from the left.
03:29Then I'm floating all the list items, that's why I need the little fix here and
03:34then each one of the links, so these are the different links, are going to be a
03:39specific font floated to the left.
03:42No text-decoration, that means no underline, color of black and little bit of
03:47padding so that they have room to each side.
03:50And then finally, we add a hover pseudo-class, and whenever I rollover these
03:55items they're going to turn a different color.
03:57Let's say it's kind of a brighter yellow, but we're going to fix that as well.
04:00So there you go. This is our basic code.
04:03Let's go back into Fireworks and see how we can add that nice gradient just by
04:08copying and pasting it from our styles.
04:10So I got this gradient selected.
04:12I have got the items selected under the Properties panel, and I'm just going to
04:16go to this button down here, it says Selected and click on Copy Selected.
04:20And I'm going to switch over to my Text Editor, and underneath my Main Navigation
04:28I'll leave that original background there. It's not going to hurt it to have it.
04:32But underneath that, I'll paste that code and you can immediately see that my
04:37gradient is applied in this area right here, which is awesome.
04:41Looks like my background is still overwriting that inside the list items, so
04:48I'm going to get rid of this right here, and now my background gradient shows up really well.
04:53So I would hate to have to write all that code myself.
04:57But you could see that there's different browser prefixes for stuff like
05:02Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft, and even older versions of Microsoft browsers here.
05:09So this is a great way of adding this kind of code in. We're almost done.
05:14So let's go ahead and fix the Rollover States, because right now if we roll over,
05:18we get sort of an ugly yellow color.
05:20So I'm going to switch back on to Fireworks.
05:23And for that, I'll need to double-click on anyone of these symbols, because
05:27these are button Symbols and button Symbols have two States.
05:30So if we look at the States panel, we'll see that the Up State has this gradient.
05:34The Over State has a slightly different gradient, so I want to get to that.
05:37I'll click on this right here.
05:39Again, click on Gradient > Copy Selected, switch over to our Text Editor and
05:47find the place where we need to put that color, which is right there, right
05:52underneath our background column, just paste and now when we roll over, we get
05:57that other different gradient.
05:59So Fireworks is especially good at writing this kind of CSS that takes care of
06:06doing things for different browser platforms.
06:09It's also a really good at doing things like Inner Shadows and Drop Shadows.
06:13So any of those things that are really difficult to deal with when working with
06:17CSS3, having to worry about the different browser platforms and different
06:22browser prefixes, Fireworks is going to make it really easy for you.
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10. jQuery Mobile
What is jQuery Mobile?
00:00One of the problems with developing mobile web sites is the number of
00:03platforms and inconsistencies and support for HTML5 and CSS3 features between those platforms.
00:09jQuery Mobile seeks to simplify the way you write pages for mobile devices by
00:13letting your write code that will work on multiple mobile platforms.
00:16So let's take a look at what jQuery Mobile is, and then we'll look at an example
00:20of how you can incorporate it in a simple web page.
00:22jQuery Mobile is a framework for developing sites for mobile devices.
00:27A framework means that it is a way of writing code so that the language delivers
00:31the code to different mobile devices through Progressive Enhancement.
00:35Progressive Enhancement means that jQuery Mobile figures out in which features a
00:38device supports and serves up a version of the page optimized for that device.
00:43Writing jQuery Mobile code is no different than writing simple HTML code.
00:47The language uses HTML5 data tags to assign additional mark-up to pages and that
00:52describes the interface elements.
00:54As a matter of fact, you don't even have to know JavaScript to build mobile web sites.
00:57So let's take a look on an example.
01:00You can see over here this is a super simple page.
01:03It's just a list of artists.
01:04It's not really meant to be a complete web site, but it's just a list of artists.
01:09And if you take a look at the HTML, you'll see that we're just have some simple HTML5 tags.
01:14We could use just div tags, but I think this is a little bit clearer.
01:17So I used a header tag here to wrap around the header, and I used an article
01:21tag here that wraps around each one of these list items that is inside an unordered list.
01:26Go down to the bottom, we also have a footer section, and in that footer we just
01:30have another list of links to potential pages.
01:33We don't have all these pages built out. I just want to show you easy it is to
01:36incorporate jQuery Mobile into your sites.
01:39So I'm going to switch over to a browser, and the first thing we need to do is
01:42download jQuery Mobile.
01:43Now if you go to the Download link, which is right here, you'll see that you can
01:47download different versions of jQuery Mobile.
01:49There are different CDN versions as well as versions you can download.
01:54It's really easier to just grab this code snippet which is what they recommend
01:58when you're developing a web site.
01:59So grab these lines of code and incorporate them on to your site.
02:03So I'm going to select those and go to the Edit menu and select Copy, and then
02:06I'm going to hide this, come back into my page, and under the head section of my
02:12site I'll add that code right there.
02:15You already see a little bit of difference on my page.
02:18There's a new background and some of these links have different colors now, and
02:22that's jQuery Mobile starting to take over the page.
02:25So usually the first thing you do in jQuery Mobile is define a series of pages.
02:30So we're going to grab and create a new div item right here, and our div is going
02:36to have a data-role.
02:39The data-role is going to be page and then usually have an id so that you could
02:43link back to those pages.
02:45So our id would be artists, and whenever we want to link to this page we will
02:49use that ID like we've done here.
02:51So this would be a link to the homepage or to a section of code that has a
02:55data-role page and an id of home instead of artists here.
03:00So potentially we could link to this page by typing in the same kind of link and
03:05just put artists right there.
03:06Okay, so we'll go now into our header code.
03:10Let me make sure I close this before I go any further.
03:12So down here at the bottom I'll just close out that div, and then we will go
03:17into the header section and we will add a new data-role for that as well.
03:22So data-role= "header", and as soon as I do that you could see that my header is now changed.
03:30It has been formatted now to look like a mobile device and that's pretty
03:33cool because with just a little single attribute I have added a certain look
03:38to my page already.
03:39So let's go back over here into header and we will add another attribute called
03:44data-position and call it fixed.
03:48So what that does is it takes care of what happens when you scroll this page down.
03:52This header automatically reappears at the top.
03:56And that's something that would be really pretty difficult to do with JavaScript.
03:59But jQuery Mobile takes care of that for you. So that's really awesome.
04:05All right. So let's modify our link to our Home page. That is right there.
04:08So what we're going to do is add an icon to this.
04:11So I'll do a data-icon, and from here I'll type in the word home.
04:18It's added the icon for the Home on to this link right here.
04:21And then I want to get rid of this text on a very small mobile device.
04:25I don't really need the word Home.
04:26The icon I think is pretty self-explanatory.
04:30So I'll do data-iconpos="notext".
04:37So now my link to my homepage is different.
04:39It doesn't have that button looking rounded edges, and it's just a little icon, so that's great.
04:44A single line of code did all that.
04:47So in my article tag I'm going to describe a section that is going to be
04:52treated as content.
04:53So I will add a data-role="content" right here, and that just tells jQuery
05:00Mobile that this section right here-- the main section containing all of my
05:03content--is defined as the content area.
05:07Finally, we'll go to the unordered list, and we will type in a new data-role for that as well.
05:13And the data-role here will be listview, and as soon as I do that you could see
05:18that now my list is formatted as a list view with the icons right here.
05:22Everything highlights nicely, and if I were to click on these and I was linking
05:27to a different page, it would also handle the animation to that page which is
05:31really good just with a single little attribute on a unordered list here.
05:37And this is even cooler. I'm going to add a data-filter here and call it true,
05:45just give it a value of true.
05:46So that adds this section right here at the top.
05:48That is essentially a little search engine built into our page.
05:51So if I click on this now on my page and I type in any letter, you could see
05:56only the results that have Bs on them.
05:57So we just added some really cool search functionality.
06:00If this is a very long list, it would be super helpful, just with, again, another
06:05attribute here, the data- filter attribute on the list.
06:07So let's take care of the footer.
06:10So we'll go to the footer section, and of course data-role is going to be footer.
06:16So you could see that that styles this section as a footer much like the header was
06:21style in this manner.
06:22The footer style in the similar manner there, and we'll add also
06:26another data-position.
06:29Now data-position is going to be fixed. Much like the header, it automatically
06:34aligns it to the bottom of the page, and let me make this window smaller here.
06:40So I'll make the window smaller.
06:42You can see that as I scroll, it does the same thing that it did to the header.
06:44It fixes the position and repositions the object.
06:47So that it always at the bottom.
06:49So that's pretty cool.
06:49Again, something that would be really hard to do with JavaScript, especially
06:53worrying about different devices and how they support different attributes, we
06:58could do the same thing with just a single attribute with jQuery Mobile.
07:02So under the nav I'm going to add a data-role for the navigation, and my
07:09data-role will be navbar, and now my bottom navigation switches to series of
07:15buttons at the bottom. That's cool.
07:18Another attribute.
07:19So let me add some icons under each one of these list items.
07:23I'm going to add a data-icon="home" and that adds the Home icon down here.
07:33So I'll do that for the rest of them.
07:37So these are icons that come with jQuery Mobile, and you can just call them by
07:42adding these data-icon attributes.
07:45And you can even add your own icon so that you can customize the look of
07:48all these right here.
07:49So these all are looking really great.
07:52We've got all kinds of functionality that we've just added by adding a few
07:56attributes to a normal HTML page.
07:58So you could see this is super easy to do, and this is an awesome way to build
08:03sites for smart phones and any other mobile device.
08:06Remember, that jQuery is going to be taking care of all the inconsistencies
08:10between the devices.
08:11So this is just a simple as adding a few attributes to any HTML page.
08:16If you're interested about learning more about jQuery Mobile or jQuery, check
08:18out Joe Marini courses on jQuery Mobile Essential Training and jQuery Essential Training.
08:26If you're a Dreamweaver user and want to learn more about jQuery Mobile
08:29Integration, check out James Williamson's Dreamweaver Essentials Training Course.
08:33As you could see, jQuery Mobile is a wonderful way to build sites for Smartphones
08:37and other mobile devices, if you know a little bit of HTML, running a jQuery
08:41Mobile application is as simple as adding a few attributes to your tags.
Collapse this transcript
Creating a jQuery Mobile template in Fireworks
00:00If you're a jQuery Mobile user, you know you can customize the look and feel of
00:03your site by using or customizing a theme.
00:07Fireworks has a great feature that makes it easy to build and customize
00:10jQuery Mobile themes,
00:12and in this movie I'm going to show you how.
00:13So I'm going to go to the Commands menu and I'm going to select jQuery Mobile
00:18Theme and then select Create New Theme.
00:22So this will actually generate a document, and in the document you'll see on the
00:27first page just a bunch of different icons that are the standard jQuery icons
00:32that you can use at different sizes.
00:35So if you wanted to customize the look of any of these icons, you could just
00:38select them, redefine them, and even redraw them to whatever you want.
00:43You have to draw the white and the black version and then the larger white and black versions.
00:48And then you have the standard active button and the icon background.
00:52So these items actually go in here.
00:55So you could recolor this background to make it whatever color you want, recolor
00:59the standard buttons, and if you click on one of these other pages, you'll
01:03see that you have some of the other content that you see in jQuery.
01:07So these are different parts of the jQuery interface.
01:11You could see here's a top bar that you would see for, like, maybe top navigation
01:15or bottom navigation in the header and the footer, and you could see that here
01:19are the classes that they affect.
01:21So these are the elements or the styles in jQuery Mobile that this style would affect.
01:27You also have link styles, as well as a Content area and some additional
01:31buttons right here.
01:33So to customize your theme, you could do a couple of things.
01:36You could just redraw or recolor any of these elements from scratch.
01:40What I like to do is go to an element or a page that is approximately what I want
01:45and then just modify it a little bit.
01:47So just because I know my site, I want to go into this particular template, the B
01:51template, and I'm going to recreate or redefine some of the colors in here.
01:56I know that for this gradient I'm going to click on that and from the Gradients
02:00little panel pop-up, I want to choose--and I'll type in some colors here because I
02:04already know what colors I want.
02:05So a7a6c9. I'm going to hit Enter.
02:12It's kind of like a light purple.
02:13And then right here I'm going to choose 545478, and that creates a nice little
02:19kind of purple gradient.
02:21I want my lines also to change so I'll click on that, and I'll click on the line right here.
02:25And for the line I want 717194, and I'll hit Enter.
02:34That gives me that nice purple line.
02:35And once I got one done, I could just copy and paste the style. This is really
02:40cool about Fireworks: you can go Edit > Copy and then click somewhere else and
02:44select Edit > Paste Attributes.
02:47So I will do the same thing for that one and for this one.
02:50And I'll go in to my main Global Assets and make sure I change this one as
02:54well, because this is for the buttons and if I don't do that, the buttons won't be changed.
02:58So again, Edit > Paste Attribute. Then go back into this b theme and I'll do it for
03:05this one again, but then I'll modify it a little bit.
03:08So Paste Attributes and that would at least give me the right border, but I do
03:12want to go in and customize this a little bit.
03:14So here my hover state will be C3C3EC, and my other color, 7C7CB1. Hit Enter.
03:30That gives me just a slightly different hover state. It looks really nice.
03:34So when I roll over one of these buttons, it'll show me this right here.
03:38I can come over here and change my link colors.
03:40So this one is going to be 717194, and I'll make my Normal link. I just copied it
03:51and then Edit > Paste Attributes.
03:53If you remember, this is a huge command key, but if you're doing that a lot, you
03:57can try to remember all this right here.
03:58So--and my link hover is going to be a little different, so that would be 9FA0D3.
04:11There, just kinda like a little highlight there.
04:13Okay, that looks really good.
04:17Now you don't have to keep all these other ones around if you don't want to use
04:20these; you can delete them.
04:22You can also make a copy of this one and duplicate it to make another page.
04:26So if you wanted to make an additional page, you could just grab any of these,
04:29drop them on top of this new layer icon, and then you can call this one like F.
04:33It's just easier to remember them as letters. And then you can modify this one and
04:37when you export it, it will be available for you in jQuery Mobile.
04:41So I like to start off with a template that looks a little bit like what I
04:45want and then just modify it a little bit, because obviously this is kind of
04:50like copy on dark backgrounds.
04:52This one is kind of mostly like copy on a dark background, but this is lighter
04:57content inside, where this one is kind of darker content inside.
05:01So this looks more like what I want, and this is looking really good.
05:06So if I want to modify another one,
05:09I've got say these two right here. There's no reason in jQuery Mobile for
05:13using just one template for everything,
05:16so another thing that you might do is maybe modify the content and the d or the c template.
05:21So I'll modify the c template, and what I'll do is I'll create myself an area of
05:26content that is just a little light yellow,
05:30so I'll pick one of these light yellows right here.
05:33I wanted to be even lighter,
05:34so I'm going to grab the eyedropper tool here from this swatch. I'm going to
05:39move it in a little bit and just make it a super- subtle light yellow, and that works really well.
05:44So I can apply this to another part of a layout and just call it as a theme c,
05:52even though I'm going to be using mostly theme b. And again, you don't need to
05:55have all these other themes. As a matter of fact, that's probably going to make the
05:58files larger than it need to be,
05:59so you could delete any ones that you don't want here.
06:03And you could see page 4 is an instructions page.
06:06You could read all that if you want to.
06:07You don't need to. I'll go ahead and get rid of that.
06:09A nice thing about having this in Fireworks is that you can save these and you
06:13can reuse them for different projects.
06:15You can modify them.
06:16That's something that maybe is not as easy to do with the ThemeRoller.
06:19So let's go ahead and preview this.
06:22I'm going to go to the Commands menu and select jQuery Mobile Theme,
06:26select Preview Theme in Browser, and this going to show you more or less what
06:30this is going to look like in a browser.
06:33So there it is, and there's the a theme, and you could see that you have a tab
06:36here for the b theme.
06:38That's what that looks like.
06:39And let's go back. It looks like I deleted one of my c themes.
06:46I'm going to undo a few times and make sure keep the c theme. So that's good.
06:51I want to get rid of d, e, and f, perhaps even my instructions.
06:57And then I want to get rid of a because I don't really need a. I really just
07:01want B and C. So once you've got that, let's go back in preview again: Commands >
07:07jQuery Mobile Theme > Preview Theme in Browser.
07:12So there's the b theme. It looks really good.
07:15There's a c theme. I'm going to use little background maybe gradient on some of
07:19my pages and go back here. It looks really good.
07:22Now, one last thing that you could do is in addition to modifying some of these
07:26icons, you can create an additional icon that you can use in your projects.
07:29So I'm going to go to Commands menu, again select jQuery Mobile Theme, and select
07:34Insert Icon Placeholder. And we have to give it a name here, so I'm going to call
07:39this heart. Select OK.
07:41It's going to run a little script.
07:43It's going to create a new position for us right here at the end of all of
07:47our existing icons.
07:48So what I'll do is I'll go in my Auto Shapes panel and there's already a cool
07:53auto shape for a heart right here.
07:55So I'm going to drag that in to my document, and there it is.
07:58It's kind of has a nice gradient, but I really want it to be colored like the other ones.
08:03So back into my layers. I'm going to turn off my Web Layer.
08:07And then I want to change it to a solid color. And I will just use the Eyedropper
08:12tool to click on a color that is similar.
08:16I don't want it to have an outline.
08:19And that's looking pretty good. I want to make it a lot smaller, because it
08:23needs to fit in this little box right here.
08:27So hit Enter to apply and drag. That is still way too big.
08:33So I'm hitting Command+T to bring up the transformation handles and then just
08:38click and drag to make it smaller.
08:41Hit Enter to apply it, and let me go ahead and hit Command+1 to see how it looks.
08:48It still looks a little big, so zoom back in, click on that, Command+T or Ctrl+T on a PC.
08:54Smaller. And sometimes it's hard to double-click in the middle to apply, so I
08:59just hit Enter and it applies it as well.
09:01So Command+1 and pretty close. I think that's actually quite good.
09:08I'm going to go ahead and click on this, zoom in really deep.
09:11I'm just modifying my handles a little bit.
09:13I don't want my heart to be as pointy here because it doesn't reproduce
09:16very well at that size.
09:18So I am going to take out some of the pointiness here
09:21and maybe make it a little chunkier.
09:22Bring this in a little bit. So let's hit Command+1 and let's see. Maybe it's
09:29still a little big. Let me go ahead and click on it. Command+T or Ctrl+T,
09:33and a little smaller.
09:35And that looks really good.
09:39So I need to make sure that it's centered within this box.
09:43So I'm going to go ahead and turn on my web layer, select both of these
09:46documents. I'm dragging the selection rectangle right there.
09:48So I'm going to select both of those elements and I want it to go to Align Tab.
09:53It's already right here, so I don't need to pull it up. Under Window I see
09:55it peeking right here.
09:57Then I'm going to hit the Align horizontal center and Align vertical center and
10:02that will center my heart within this box.
10:06And I'll turn off my web layers again
10:08because I need a copy of it right down here.
10:13And I need to make this copy white,
10:15so over here, click on the Eyedropper tool.
10:18I'll click on the Fill tool, and then it gives you the eyedropper, and then I'll
10:23click on one of these other one's and it'll pick up the color, which is white for
10:28that, black for that.
10:29And then I need to make sure that this is also centered. Oops!
10:32Let me go back in there, turn on my web layer, and repeat. Just do Align center, center,
10:43Copy. And actually I want to click on both of these and then do Edit > Copy.
10:56And I'm going to need to make bigger versions, so I'll come over here hit Paste,
11:02hit the Transform tool here, or Command+T will work.
11:06So I need to get that Diagonal Resize tool, and I'll resize it. That's
11:12a little bit too big.
11:13Go back down, a little more.
11:17It's looking pretty good so I'm hitting Enter. Maybe a little bit too big
11:21still, so select them Command+T or Ctrl+T on a PC, make them smaller. Enter.
11:29That's about right.
11:30So turn on my web layer, select these objects, align, align.
11:36This one okay, since one is outside, remember that when you align things, it's
11:40going to pick the bigger of the two and use that as the measurement or in the
11:45case of centering, it's going to average the center.
11:47So I want to make sure my heart is inside.
11:49Pull it up a little bit with the arrow keys.
11:52So once I got it more or less perfect, then I'll select it and then you
11:55use Align Tools here.
11:57It probably doesn't matter because it's going to use the slice wherever it is,
12:00but I just like to be careful.
12:02Now I've got a new icon and I can use that in any of my jQuery Mobile
12:08templates. And I can keep on adding icons, which is a really, really nice
12:11feature in Fireworks.
12:13So I really like jQuery Mobile integration in Fireworks
12:16a little bit better than ThemeRoller.
12:18It just allows me to save the information and continue to use my templates over and over.
12:23So once you've got this, you can save it and reuse it wherever you want, and that
12:27makes it more convenient than the ThemeRoller sometimes.
Collapse this transcript
Working with a jQuery Mobile template
00:00So once you've created a theme using Fireworks for jQuery Mobile, it's time to
00:04export this theme so that you can use it on a real project.
00:08So I already got this theme that I've created and I'm going to go to the
00:11Commands menu and select jQuery Mobile Theme and then choose Export Theme. Okay.
00:17So now I need to go to my desktop and find the site folder that I created
00:22there, and that site folder just has a basic jQuery Mobile site.
00:25I'm going to open up this underscore folder.
00:28That's usually where I keep all of my CSS and JavaScript files whenever
00:31I'm building a site. I'll choose the CSS folder.
00:34In this folder, you can see some styles that I've already created for the site,
00:38And I am going to hit Choose. It's going to generate a lot of files, and my CSS file name is going to be
00:44custom, so I'll click OK. And it's going to run a little script that exports all of the files.
00:50So now that it's done, I'm going to switch over to my text editor. And here's my text editor.
00:54This is what the site looks like right now;
00:56it's just a regular jQuery Mobile site.
00:58Let me go through on the right- hand side to show you how it works.
01:01So you've got a few buttons on this homepage.
01:03If we click on some of these, you can go to a schedule.
01:06Schedule has an additional page that shows a picture, and the artist that's
01:11going to be playing in that schedule.
01:13So you can also go to the Artist page to see a list of artists right here. And
01:19you also have a Gallery, and in the Gallery, you can click and see some photos. So, back home.
01:26So we're going to modify this with the template that we just built.
01:30To assign a template to a page, what you do is you add an attribute to your item
01:36that has a data-role page.
01:37This is a div that wraps the entire page, and you can see this is the homepage
01:41because it has an ID of Home.
01:44Here's the entire page right here, just three buttons, which are right here, plus
01:47an image. And we have this entire div with an attribute called data-role="page".
01:53So, to add a custom template, all we have to do is add another attribute here
01:58called data-theme, and then just assign it the attribute that we want to use.
02:02So in this case, we should use b, and it's right now showing you actually
02:07the default b template,
02:08because one thing I haven't done here is called in my custom CSS file.
02:13So let me go ahead and do that.
02:14Right before my custom style sheet, which is right here, I need to add a link to my custom.css file that I just created.
02:22So, link rel="stylesheet", so it's going to be a style sheet. And the href is
02:28going to be again, because all my files are in that underscore folder, under
02:33CSS, and I called my style custom, and you could see it's already applying
02:38some of it. And once I complete this line here, it's going to show the actual style here.
02:44So you can see now my buttons are all purple.
02:46So if you don't specify a custom style sheet, your page will look like this.
02:51If you do, then it's going to apply any of those styles to this page as well.
02:55That's pretty cool! I like that.
02:57It's looking nice already.
02:58So let's go ahead and switch over to the Schedule page.
03:01This still has the old look and feel.
03:05Let me see if I can modify that.
03:08I'll go ahead, and just copy this data-theme="b" and go over to the Schedule
03:12page, which is right underneath the homepage.
03:15Just add that in and see what happens.
03:17Now, you could see here that it's not perfect.
03:20It's not applying this style to the header and footer, and it's applied it
03:24here, but it's centering things, which I don't like.
03:27I don't really like this dark purple in this particular page.
03:30So remember, I created a style called C that looked a little bit different.
03:34It had maybe a yellow border here.
03:37I see the yellow gradient right here in this background, which I really like. That's cool.
03:41I don't really mind these colors.
03:43Go back to the Home. But I really don't like the way some of these buttons are
03:50looking, especially if I click on them, they're still left-aligning.
03:54So I need to fix some of these issues.
03:56I need to make sure my header and my footers have the proper styles.
04:00So here's the data-role="header" part.
04:03So I can add a theme to that by adding a keyword here, or an attribute called
04:08data-theme, and then I will use a data-theme="b".
04:10You can see that my header is now fixed.
04:14I think it looks a lot better if it's that purple color for that data-theme="b".
04:17I want to do the same thing to the footer,
04:20so I'm going to scroll down to my footer section and paste that new data theme,
04:26and my buttons now look really nice. So, that's cool,
04:30but I want to do that everywhere, because if I go to another page, you'll
04:33see the same problem.
04:34My header and my footer aren't the right color.
04:37So I want to fix that everywhere, so I'm going to do a Find and Replace.
04:40Almost any text editor has some sort of Find and Replace function.
04:43So I'm just undoing a few times.
04:45I am just going to Command+Z on a Mac, Ctrl+Z on a PC until it's back to
04:49where it used to be.
04:51What I'll do is I'll copy this div right here with data-role="header" and that space.
04:56I'll copy that, and then I will do a Find, which in here is under Edit > Find.
05:02But in any text editor, you should see some sort of Find and Replace command,
05:05and that's what you want to do.
05:06So I'm going to find data-role="header" and replace it with the same thing,
05:10except add data-theme="B" and then make sure you put the space right there at
05:16the end, and I'll hit Replace All.
05:18That will take care of replacing all of my headers.
05:21So, if I go to any other page, yeah, there's the Schedule, it has the correct
05:26Header, Artists, and even the Gallery has the correct header.
05:31I need to do the same thing for the footer,
05:33so I'll go here and type in "footer" and replace with "footer." And then add
05:40data-theme="b" to all of them,
05:42so I will hit Replace All, and that should take care of all of our footers.
05:46So now at least our headers and footers are looking correct.
05:50I don't like this kind of alignment here,
05:53so I need to fix that back in the template.
05:55I'm going to switch over to Fireworks, and I am going to go over to my Pages.
06:03And what's happening is on some of these templates, like right here, if I don't
06:10do anything to this template, it's going to be center-aligned.
06:13So If I want to make sure that something is left-aligned, I need to click on the
06:16Left-align little icon here under Properties palette.
06:19Even if it looks like it's centered, it's not anymore.
06:22So if I made these bigger, you would see that these are centered.
06:26But what I want is all of these to be left-aligned.
06:29So, I'll click on these, left-align them, and I'm also going to copy this
06:33gradient everywhere on this layout.
06:36So, Paste Attributes.
06:39I'm not really going to care about a hover state on this one. And my link
06:48colors are probably fine.
06:51So now, I'm going to go to the Commands menu, go to jQuery Mobile Theme, select
06:57Export Theme, and back into my CSS folder.
07:00So there's my underscore folder. Here's my site folder that's on my desktop.
07:07You notice that it created all these files, including a custom.
07:10css and then files for each of the icons, and also an images folder that has the
07:16images right here, all the icons.
07:18So I'm just going to come back here, choose the same folder, and it's going to overwrite them.
07:24I can call it Custom.
07:25It's going to replace everything and go through it.
07:30Replace everything and go back to my editor, and then I'm going to hit Refresh.
07:35You could see that now these are that nice little gradient color, which is pretty cool.
07:40So let's talk about replacing one of these icons.
07:44You remember in the previous movie, I created an icon called Heart.
07:48So let me just go to my homepage and then click on the Schedule.
07:53So, on the Schedule, I'm just going to change this artists link.
07:59So I'll scroll down to the bottom where I have the links, and there you go!
08:04So here, I'm using data-icon="star".
08:06If you remembered from the last movie, when I created my new icon, I called it heart.
08:11So all I have to do is just put in the new icon that I created, the name of the
08:14new icon, and it automatically updates right here.
08:18So as you can see, there's no reason to just one single style;
08:21you can customize your styles, you can use multiple themes for different pages,
08:27different icons just by adding, modifying this data icon attribute on wherever
08:33you want the new icons to be, and Fireworks just makes it super simple to create
08:37any kind of new theme, new custom icons.
08:41It's really a great way of managing your templates and using them in your
08:45jQuery Mobile sites.
Collapse this transcript
Conclusion
Next steps
00:00So I hope you enjoyed the course.
00:02If you like Fireworks, mobile design, or jQuery, there are a few resources you
00:06should definitely check out.
00:07I like this web site called fireworkszone.com.
00:09It has a number of extensions as well as textures and different articles on
00:15how to use Fireworks.
00:16It's a pretty cool site.
00:18You can also check out this web site from John Dunning that has a series of
00:22extensions with Fireworks that I've used in this course.
00:25So you might want to check out some of these, especially like this Grids command.
00:28It's a really good way for laying out grids without having to go to Templates.
00:33I also like this Placeholder command.
00:35You can take a look around here. There's a lot of really cool stuff that he
00:38has on his web site.
00:40We also have a number of courses in lynda.com that you should check out.
00:44I especially like jQuery Mobile Essential Training from Joe Marini, as well as
00:48jQuery Essential Training. And if you're into the JQuery features of Fireworks,
00:54you should check out both of these courses.
00:56You can also check out my weekly series View Source, where I give you web tips in
00:59about 10 minutes, or look at any of my other courses online.
01:03Finally, I definitely recommend James Williamson's CSS Page Layouts course.
01:07It's a really cool course on laying out elements with CSS.
01:11So it's definitely a good companion course to the Fireworks course because so
01:15much of what you're doing with CSS is prepping graphics and applying them
01:19into your web layouts.
01:21If you're in to Dreamweaver, you may also want to check out James Williamson's
01:25Dreamweaver CS6 Essential Training.
01:27So once again, this is Ray Villalobos, and I hope you continue to enjoy building the web.
01:31Goodbye!
Collapse this transcript


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