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Jon Phillips
In this interview, we have Jon Phillips who will share his experience and insights on Fireworks.
To begin with, who are you and where are you from?
Hi, my name is Jon Phillips. I'm a web & UX designer, entrepreneur and musician from Montreal, Canada. http://jonphillips.ca/What do you work as in your day job?
I work on a freelance basis mostly as a web designer and front-end developer with a focus on UX, usability.What type of projects do you work in Fireworks and are there any challenges you faced that Fireworks have helped you? For most web-design projects I'll use Fireworks only, except for sketching and wireframing which I do in a DotGrid Notebook. I use Fireworks for prototyping and for full website designs and graphics as well as some vector artwork. I'm not big on Photoshop, to me it is a tool to edit photographs, not to design websites. So, while I know Photoshop, I much prefer working with Fireworks, everything makes more sense and I find it helps my workflow.
How long have you been using Fireworks?
I've been using it for about 6 or 7 years now.Why should a designer use Fireworks?
There's hundreds of reasons designers should use Fireworks but I can only speak in terms of web-design and not in terms of print since most of my work is meant for the web. Photoshop, while it's a great tool, isn't suited for web-design, from better image compression to much faster and easier workflow, Fireworks wins almost every time.Tell us why Fireworks is your preferred choice for doing user interface design / web design? I'd say that the main reason is a better workflow - while the interface may feel a bit dated to some, I find it very intuitive and easy to work with. Fireworks is also very quick to open compared to Photoshop and I also very much like the Pages feature in Fireworks.
Fireworks excels as a rapid prototyping tool. How does Fireworks helps you in your daily design workflow?
It is very intuitive and it does vector, too. While many web-designers will keep going back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator, I simply do almost everything in Fireworks.What is your favorite workflow in Fireworks and why?
After gathering information about a project and when I'm done sketching and wireframing on paper (I always do this in my trusty DotGrid Notebook) I open up Fireworks and load up a grid, whether it's a 960px grid or another format, I always start with a grid.Then I'll start placing boxes and some text according to my wireframe and then adjust, edit, remove and add as I go and depending on the project specs. Then, I'll start working on various screen sizes and layouts to get a better feel of how it will look in different browsers. I've been using CSS3 Media Queries and dabbling into responsive and adaptive web-design quite a lot lately and I think it makes a lot more sense to design, then dive into development right away, and then go back to Fireworks to work on other screen resolution mock-ups, and then back to development.
If you can only list 5 favorite best features in Fireworks, what will they be?
Vector tools, Pages, Exporting images and compression, Property inspector and Live filters.
Many people compare Photoshop with Fireworks. What is your viewpoint in this?
In my opinion Fireworks is a better tool for web-design than Photoshop. Photoshop should be used to edit photos, not to create complex website layouts. Granted, Fireworks doesn't offer type rendering that's true-to-browser but neither does PS and Illustrator. So, with that out of the way, Fireworks is still much better suited for web-design than PS .Fireworks work even better with fireworks extensions. What are your favorite extensions from other developers and how do you use it in your work?
John Dunning created a ton of great FW extensions and I often use a lot of them but my favorites would be Grids, Lorem Ipsum and Fix Rounded Rect Corners.
Do you develop your own Fireworks commands?
Not really, apart from some keyboard shortcuts for things I use all the time.Do you have a Fireworks tip for the Fireworks community?
If you use Fireworks make sure you tell people about it - there is not guarantee that Adobe will always have FW in their CS line-up, so spreading the word and getting more people to use FW is key (and those people would thank you, too).Are you involved with any communities on the web?
Of course, I've quite active on Twitter. I also very much enjoy Dribbble, Flickr, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.Do you have a blog? Where can we find you?
Sure thing, you can visit my site at JonPhillips.ca where I also have a blog.
Thanks for the opportunity to talk you, Jon. Last question, any advice to the designers out there exploring Fireworks?
Thanks for having me! Keep playing around in Fireworks, I'm sure you'll discover how great it is. Introducing Fireworks in your workflow doesn't mean changing everything and changing the way you do things, it means making things easier and faster.
Connecting the World with Fireworks
Click and drag the "Yellow Guy" icon located above the zoom slider onto the google map. Blue overlay areas allow you to see street map view! Have Fun!
