What is Fireworks?

If you have web graphics to create - any web graphics, Fireworks is a tool that you should definitely get to know.

Rather than attempting to teach you to use this fine product, this site is an attempt to show you some of the capabilities of Fireworks.

Need an animated gif? No problem.
Need rollovers for your site? Got it handled.
How about an image map? Piece of cake!
In fact, if you can think of a web graphic, you can create it in Fireworks.

Macromedia's Fireworks has been voted time and time again the best graphics program for creating web graphics, and with the latest release, version 3, it's even better. Version 3 more fully integrates Fireworks with other Macromedia web design products such as Dreamweaver and Flash, not to mention Adobe's GoLive, and Microsoft's FrontPage. So many possibilities.

One of Fireworks specialties is exporting HTML and JavaScript. If you create a large graphic, and would like to cut it into smaller pieces, with Fireworks you can slice and dice it to your hearts content, and then export an HTML table which will, amazingly enough, reassemble perfectly in your user's browser.

Aside from HTML tables, Fireworks will also create and export rollovers, image maps, and many other types of objects. I've been playing with Fireworks for the past few months, and every time I use it I discover new capabilities to put to use.

Once you've used Fireworks for creating your web graphics, I'm sure you'll agree that it's a tool that you'd truly hate to be without.


About Graphics

Graphics are generally categorized into two different types - either vector or bitmap. If you understand that all graphics are made up of little dots called pixels (short for picture element) it's easier to understand the concept of raster and bitmap graphics.

Bitmap Graphics

Most graphics you're going to see on the web are bitmap graphics, and most fall into two categories - either gif (graphics interchange format), or jpeg (joint photographics experts group). Both of these formats have their benefits and drawbacks. With bitmap graphics, each individual pixel in your graphic has to be defined - both its location and its color. If, for instance, you have a simple line that contains 500 pixels, with a raster graphic, you have 500 individually defined pixels.

Vector Graphics

If we use our simple line as an example of vector graphics, the definition might contain just the starting and ending points of our line, and its color. We've just reduced the number of defined elements from 500 to 2.