Adobe Fireworks is often misunderstood in the world of design and web development alike. According to Adobe’s features page for Fireworks,

Rapidly prototype websites, application interfaces, and other interactive designs with Adobe Fireworks CS4. Create, edit, and optimize web graphics more accurately and quickly than ever with an enhanced toolset. Demo your designs live on the web for your clients or e-mail them an Adobe PDF file generated from Fireworks. Integrate Live Styles and the improved Common Library for continual leaps in productivity.

It appears that much emphasis on Fireworks is taken on web design and development, but for those who would like to see what else Fireworks can do outside of web design, I’ve put together a list of tutorials I’ve found within the past year that can not only benefit designers, but introduce them to one of Adobe’s more mysterious applications they offer.

Furthermore, before we get started with the tutorials, it’s important and beneficial to know that Fireworks is both a raster and vector editor. To know more about both, please see our post on Raster vs. Vector.

1. How to use a Mask

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the masking capabilities that come built into Adobe Fireworks. The end result in this tutorial is an image that resembles a Polaroid photo. This can be great for adding a family photo album theme to any design.

2. Creating a Realistic Photo Effect

As an alternative to the Polaroid tutorial, this tutorial demonstrates how to make images look like traditional photographs. Be warned that this tutorial takes a little more skill and patience than the previous one, but if you are savvy in Photoshop, you shouldn’t have any problems.

3. Creating a Page Curl Effect

Use or create any kind of paper texture you want for this tutorial to create a curled corner effect. The tutorial uses aged paper textures for their example. You can find textures like this here.

4.  Creating an Old Photo

This really simple tutorial demonstrates some of the built in functionality of Fireworks.  This tutorial only requires about three steps to complete!

5.  Creating a Ribbon

This step by step tutorial demonstrates how to draw, texture, and add text to a ribbon.

6.  Digital Collage

This tutorial is great for creating modern design collages.  This tutorial is also a great example of how well Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks mesh together.  This tutorial is time consuming, so be sure to save it for when you have some extra time to spend on learning.

7.  Extracting a Logo

This tutorial demonstrates Fireworks’ feature of handling both raster and vector graphics.  You’ll learn how to take a raster logo with a white background and integrate it into a new image with added effects.

I hope that you enjoy this set of tutorials and give Fireworks  a chance in future design projects.  Happy designing!