6 Places to Turn Yourself into an Adobe Fireworks Professional

For those of you who don’t know yet, Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor. This software is mainly used by professional web developers and graphic artists to design, edit and optimize graphics for the web. An additional feature is that this extremely useful program can export JavaScript which enables its users to control multiple functions Even though Adobe Fireworks is not an HTML editor, it can generate HTML files which link to each other. While many designers work with Dreamweaver in developing sites, Fireworks handles the creation, editing and optimizing of graphic content for the web site. Therefore, these two pieces of software work hand in hand just as good as separately, if not better. If you have decided to master the secrets of Fireworks, look no further. We will provide a handy, useful guide on how to get started or improve and turn into a pro with this editor. Take a deep breath and get ready for an interesting journey, which will make you lit fireworks, literally, at the end.

1. Adobe’s Official Website

Probably the best way to start learning something is going at its source. And there’s where we recommend that you first go too. If don’t have Firework yet, there you can find a free trial of it, to see where your investment might go. You also have the possibility of buying it (from the site or locating a reseller) or upgrading, if you’re already a happy owner. Along with the answers to many, if not all of your question about Fireworks (see the FAQ section), you’ll find a set of articles and tutorials for better comprehension of the subject.

There’s a large variety of services and information available and you’ll know for sure, that even if you decide to bookmark the page and visit it later, everything will be up to date, trustworthy and coming from professionals.

2. Pxleyes’ Fireworks Tutorial Section

Ok, after you got the information needed and, hopefully, the program, you can proceed to learning as much as possible about it. Even if Pxleyes.com might not be the biggest Fireworks tutorial database existing online (or it just might…) you will have the certainty of finding high quality tutorials, as they are all handpicked, meaning that every tutorial was read and analyzed before being listed.

This site also offers the possibility of following both written fireworks tutorial directory and a fireworks video tutorials section, as some people adapt better to only one of the supports mentioned. There’s a search box which will help you quickly find the type of tutorials that you are looking for due to the fact that they are all submitted with the most relevant tags. If you wish to go further, the site provides a free membership which will enable your participation in contests and most importantly, getting feedback on your work with following the lessons.

3.Entheos Web’s Fireworks Section

Here’s another website that can provide a lot of help in your process of learning about this great software. A worth mentioning advantage of this location would be that you can easily find your way through this page, as you will clearly distinguish the following sections: New! Adobe Fireworks CS4 Tutorials, Tutorials, Tips & Concepts, Image Effects, Text Effects and Free Fireworks Resources.

A shortcoming of the site is the fact that the number of tutorials you will find here is not very impressive and you will mostly want to be there if you are a beginner or at an intermediate level of knowledge, but since they are all exclusive ones, this can be really helpful and interesting experience.

4. Fireworks Zone

Here’s another website that will help you a lot in your learning process. The Fireworks Zone website provides a large number of tutorials, tips and tricks, along with resources and various guides. It even gives some recommended sites and Adobe links and Adobe Users Groups

While it offers a lot of other information and it is fully dedicated to Adobe Fireworks, the site looks a little messy and the listing of the tutorials is not categorized on the main page.

5. Website Tips’ Fireworks Section

With a clean and professional layout, this site provides Adobe Fireworks Tutorials, Articles, Extensions, Discussion Lists, Resources, Books and Software. The tips and tutorials are of great reliability and professionally written. They are mainly for users with already a little or more experience in Fireworks, but because they are very well structured and the steps are supported by images, they are easy to follow.

You can find here the “Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Fireworks Official Product Information, Help” section, with the “Using Fireworks” article linked in, which we would highly recommend reading, as it contains lots of details on how to use Fireworks, from A to Z.

6. Blue 2X

And here’s the site that we will end our Fireworks learning journey with. Blue 2X is actually a blog which provides some useful tutorials, a few resources and some inspirational artworks. The shortcoming of the blog is the fact that the tutorials are not categorized or structured in any way and the videos are mixed among the written tutorials, but seeing that there’s a quite limited number of lessons, there will be no problem in quickly finding what you need and why not, follow all of them.

There is no way in which one can appreciate the quality of the tutorials, because there is no voting system, but the good part is that you won’t find tutorials older than 2 years, unlike on a lot of other sites. So it moves a little slow, but in the end it’s updated.

Conclusion

We must say that these are just 6 of what we consider to be the most relevant sources for Adobe Fireworks learning, but of course you can find some others online. We have tried to emphasize the importance of this software in the life of every web developer and graphic artist and we hope that you find useful these sources and you get your work rolling. Best of luck!