Adobe Fireworks has a few more control settings than Photoshop when it comes to certain things, and gradients are one of them. In Photoshop, you have your typical Radial gradients, linear, angle, reflected and diamond. You can also create transparent gradients, but in Fireworks, you can do all of that, as well a a few other options.

Go into the Properties panel and choose the tab that allows you to change the fill. You can fill an object with nothing, a solid color, patterns, a gradient, or you can select more options. Here you can choose from a bunch of different gradient options, such as folds, ripples, etc. You can also choose from a bunch of different color presets, like you can in Photoshop, but here you can also feather the gradient, and preview it live, and you can add a … Read More »

This is a really cool feature found right inside of Adobe Fireworks. What is great about this feature is that when you blend the colors, they are safe for the web. Many times when I am building site composite, or a piece of web work I would like a mix of two major colors that I am using in the site, or a mix of two colors found within a photo. This is really easy to do inside of Fireworks with the Color Blender found within the Color Palette.

All you have to do is go down to the bottom of the Color Palette. This is where you can control all of the settings for the mix of the two colors. The different blocks are the number of steps in color gradation from your first color choice to the second one. … Read More »

We have all had this problem when making a web site – You are creating a mock-up of your web site, and you have a distinct number of menus. You want to create buttons that are the same width across as the header and that are spread out evenly across your site. Fireworks has a couple of menus that help with this.

In the example below, I am creating a menu where I have the number of buttons that I want, I just need to figure out a consistent width for all of them to span the full width of the header evenly. Firework has a tool in the align panel just for this.

Select all of your buttons (without the text, because it may become distorted), and go up to the Modify menu, and select Group. … Read More »

I really love to work with Adobe Fireworks when making graphics for the web. It is simple, intuitive, and has a few features that give you a little more control than what you find in photoshop. It is almost like Fireworks is a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop in one. In Fireworks, you find a couple more options for gradients, but you also find patterns built in that are useful. The extra options make it easy to manipulate those patterns as well.

I created a new document, set to the dimensions of 800px wide x 600px tall. In the vector section of the tools panel, I selected the rectangle tool. I drew out a box the same size as my canvas. If you have your properties panel open, you … Read More »