Adobe Edge Preview 3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Working with Art

You can think of Edge as an animation management tool. Using Edge, you determine what elements show on the stage, their position, and their appearance. You can create text and simple visual elements within Edge, but it’s likely that you’ll create more complicated artwork in some other program like Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks.

This chapter examines what types of graphics you can and can’t create within Edge. It starts off by defining the stage and the ways you can modify it. You’ll learn about all the properties of the rectangle and rounded rectangle. With creativity, you can create some distinctly non-rectangular shapes. Along the way, you’ll learn how to quickly align and arrange objects on the stage. The chapter then goes on to explain how to import artwork from your other favorite applications, such as Illustrator or Fireworks, and you’ll get some tips about the best free graphics programs you can find on the Web.

Setting the Stage

As the Bard explained a few hundred years ago, “All the world’s a stage.” That’s certainly true for your Edge animations. As explained in Chapter 1, when you place an element on the stage, it’s visible to your audience. There are a couple of ways to hide or remove elements from the stage. If you have the stage Overflow properties set to hidden, then you can exit stage right, left, top, or bottom by moving the element off stage. At least, it’s not visible. The Hello World exercise also showed ...