What is Adobe Fireworks?

What is Adobe Fireworks?

Fireworks is a fascinating creature. Like Illustrator, it works primarily with vector graphics with some marginal bitmap editing available. But, Fireworks is oriented for web and mobile application development. Fireworks can make just about any graphic interactive, and it allows you to create both wireframes and object behaviors. With that said, it is geared more towards developers and less towards artists. But, there are examples of artists who use Fireworks almost exclusively, such as The Oatmeal webcomics. And artist Jose Rivera uses Fireworks almost exclusively for all of his work found here.

Overall it is a useful program to have in any graphic artist’s arsenal. Even though it lacks some of the vector editing capabilities of Illustrator, Fireworks can create brilliant user interfaces, websites, and interactive websites in a vector or bitmap format.

Adobe creates a lot of programs, many of which I found myself unfamiliar with until recently. Most people know about Flash, Photoshop, and Adobe Reader. But those aren’t the only programs Adobe develops. In the past, it was a fairly large investment to buy the suite however in recent years, =standing each of Adobe’s software programs.



In the 6th iteration of the Adobe Creative Suite (that’s where the “CS” comes from), there are 16 programs. In addition to the Creative Suite, there are several other suites and enterprise products. For time’s sake, I’ll just focus on the primary 16.

Photoshop® CS6 Extended
Illustrator® CS6
InDesign® CS6
Acrobat® X Pro
Flash® Professional CS6
Flash Builder® 4.6 Premium Edition
Dreamweaver® CS6
Fireworks® CS6

Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6
After Effects® CS6
Adobe Audition® CS6
SpeedGrade™ CS6
Prelude™ CS6
Encore® CS6
Bridge CS6
Media Encoder CS6