Set Me a Graphic Design Challenge!
It seems you're liking this mini series (well, if you can call two posts a series) of Fireworks How To articles? I'm enjoying writing them, but can't think of anything else to write about and wondered if there was anything you wanted me to talk about.
Perhaps challenge is the wrong word. I do like a challenge. But then I'm not pretending to be a talented graphic designer by any means. What I want to do is prove that there's no need to be scared of producing graphics. As long as you have the right toolbox (Fireworks in my case) and a working knowledge of the tools in it (Pen, Slice, Mask etc) then you'd be surprised how easy some things are.
So, if there's something you've seen on a website and thought "I wish I could do that" let me know and I'll see if I can show you how.
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Automated graphics. I've tried integrating things like ImageMagick into Domino so that graphics could be uploaded to the system, scaled and resized, and then have a logo stamped on them. But how about Fireworks? Is there some kind of automated system where you can set up a series of tasks for it to carry out en mass?
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Yeah, you can do stuff like that in Fireworks. You can create "commands" from the History pane which lists all your recent actions.
You can completely automate it using JavaScript http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Fireworks/10.0_Extending/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d1183c9481fb-8000.html
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The command records is also very powerful when used with the batch function. used to good effect when I had to scale and water mark 900 3000 x 2000 product images.
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Dancing sheep?
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Already done. http://www.eclectech.co.uk/b3ta/3sheepdancers.gif
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Something that would be useful, perhaps, would be color themed sprite packs with blank buttons in one image and icons in another so they can be overlaid in CSS on the fly to change the theme for the user's liking.
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How about a button graphic that supports all three states; normal, hover and selected? The selected graphic should look like a button depressed.
Kind if similar to Jerry's sprite pack idea.
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Can you point me to an example Rob?
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Hi Jake, how about producing banner like this one?
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/wp-content/themes/inove/img/header.jpg
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Hi Benny. That's easy enough. Just a couple of rectangles with the right combination of Fill and Pattern settings on them.
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hi Jake, I've seen websites where the site name is written in big letters across the site in the same colour as the page background but shadows have been added to the inside of each letter to give the illusion of the site name having been stamped into the page background.
I think it looks pretty difficult and something that you would really need a package like photoshop to do.
Can Fireworks do this?
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Easy enough. Leave it with me.
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Here's one Jake,
Say you have a photo of the countryside, features and ground at the bottom, big sky at the top. Now, the sky is a bit washed out so you want to bring out the colour of sky. Withouth selecting all the sky and tracing around objects (the marquee tool?) which may be sticking up into the sky, how do you cut out just the sky so you can eithe touch it up or even stick in a different sky from another photo?
It's had me baffled. Can Fireworks solve this?
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Fireworks could possibly solve that, but it sounds to me like something more suited to Photoshop.
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