Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Fireworks

Many designers prefer to use Photoshop or Illustrator for mocking up screen layouts. Although both of these can be very useful (I used Illustrator for years before switching to Fireworks), Fireworks (http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks.html) has both of them beat for a few key reasons:

Share layers among pages

A key component to the magic of Fireworks’ multiple pages feature is the ability to share layers (think Photoshop or Illustrator Layers) among several pages in your file. So your header, which is consistent from page to page, can be set up as a single layer, then shared to every page in your document. Change that header once, and every page is changed. Genius! You can also export individual layers as images, which is useful for logos, backgrounds and other elements that you need to transfer from design comp to an image in your theme.

Multiple pages

With Fireworks, you can include multiple pages for the same site in one layout. You can also share layers among different pages. Why is this valuable? Consider this: in most design projects, you might have several pages that you need to lay out for a given design. However, certain elements (such as your grid, or your navigation menu) don’t necessarily change from page to page. If you created all of these layouts in Photoshop or Illustrator, and had to make changes to the navigation, you’d have to modify each one of those files in turn. With Fireworks, you can change one layer in your file, export it to PDF, and automatically ...