Flash in the Peg

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, November 1st, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. As usual, we’ll meet in room W411, Red River College, Princess Street Campus. Our topic for this meeting is prototyping web sites using Adobe Fireworks CS3.

Lots of people think of Fireworks as just a simplified version of Photoshop. While you can use Fireworks as ‘Photoshop Lite’, if that’s all you do with it then you’re missing out.

One of Fireworks’ many features that set it apart is the ability to easily and rapidly prototype web site designs. Taking your design mockups from flat jpegs to an interactive prototype can help you test your design, and can help communicate your vision for the site to your client.

We’ll walk through the process of taking a site mockup from a Photoshop file to a working prototype using Fireworks’ new Pages feature. That’s right: we’re not saying goodbye to Photoshop. Fireworks CS3 is nicely integrated with Photoshop, so you can continue working in Photoshop to create your original design, then import that into Fireworks to build your prototype. (Fireworks is also great for creating mockups from scratch, and we’ll look at that, too).

Plus, we’ll also talk about some of the announcements that were made at MAX. You may have heard some of them already, but I thought it might be interesting to chat about a few of those, as well as my general impressions of the conference. I’ll send some links around next week if you want to read up before the meeting.

And of course there are prizes! Since this is the last meeting before the FITC Winnipeg Roadshow, it’s your last chance to win a free admission to the second day of the two-day event. We’ll also have a few other goodies to give away.

So I hope you can make it out! I’d appreciate it if your emailed me to let me know if you can attend. Personally, I think Fireworks is a great piece of software, and I hope you’ll see it in a new light after our next meeting!