Drupal for Designers

Chapter 7. Putting It in Practice—Setting Up Fireworks Templates for Drupal

While the Fireworks templates provided by Chapter Three^[22] can be an excellent starting point for your layouts, you may find that having a predetermined set of styles and pages inhibits your creativity. Even if something’s all in Helvetica and isn’t meant to be a final layout, it can be easy to get caught up in other priorities and let the defaults do the heavy lifting. Additionally, while the templates provide a good set of default areas that you’ll want to consider for 90% of your Drupal implementations, every project is unique enough that it generally makes sense to put some thought into how you want to set up your layouts rather than depending on what another design team has done.

In this chapter I’ll outline a fairly simple process for creating your own custom layout in Fireworks. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic knowledge of how to use Fireworks; if you haven’t used it before and need to learn it, Lynda.com^[23] has a Fireworks CS5 training course, and the Adobe Classroom in a Book series has an excellent book on Fireworks.^[24] In addition, the book Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-To’s: 100 Essential Techniques^[25] deals with the previous version of Fireworks, but still provides an excellent introduction to using the software. If you are already familiar with Photoshop or Illustrator, the transition to Fireworks should be relatively smooth.

For the purposes of this overview, I’ll focus on setting ...