Fireworks CS3 Review on Designorati

About two weeks ago, Jeremy Shulz pub­lished an “inter­est­ing” review of Fireworks on Designorati. I put “inter­est­ing” in quotes because I strongly dis­agree with many of his points… start­ing with the title of his review: “Fireworks CS3 Is Looking For its Niche”.

I sup­pose I shouldn’t be but I’m always sur­prised when poeo­ple who should know bet­ter still see Fireworks as a “niche” prod­uct. I can’t believe that after all these years, so many design­ers have still not seen how much of a cre­ative pow­er­house Fireworks really is and con­tinue to try and min­i­mize both its objec­tive work­flow strenghts as well as its impact in a large part of the Web design community.

I posted a com­ment to the review where I explain why I am in dis­agree­ment with it but you’ll find a copy of my com­ment below. If you agree with me, you should prob­a­bly com­ment there as well. Those of us who “get” Fireworks should really make an effort to evan­ge­lize it and explain why it has become so impor­tant to our own cre­ative workflows.

Hi Jeremy,

It’s nice to see Designorati talk about Fireworks and let me thank you for men­tion­ing my arti­cle in your review. You have to be aware that I wrote that piece quite a while ago when the cur­rent ver­sion of Fireworks was MX 2004 and Photoshop was at ver­sion 7. That explains some of the points I was mak­ing about Photoshop.

Regarding your review, I don’t think you will be sur­prised to know that I dis­agree with many of your points, espe­cially your insis­tence at posi­tion­ing Fireworks as a “niche” prod­uct. I really could not dis­agree more with that statement.

I strongly believe that the main rea­son Fireworks has not been more widely adopted by design­ers for actual cre­ative work at this point is the for­mer Macromedia’s inep­ti­tude at mar­ket­ing it cor­rectly. It’s cer­tainly not Fireworks’ toolset or work­flow that is lack­ing, espe­cially not now with CS3. It’s not per­fect, but it offers a an intu­itive, flex­i­ble and pow­er­ful work­flow that no other appli­ca­tion I know of offers.

Fireworks has been my main cre­ative tool for almost 10 years now. It has replaced Photoshop in a part of my process where I had always found Photoshop to be incred­i­bly awk­ward for many of the rea­sons I stated in my arti­cle. Even with the improve­ments in Photoshop over the years which do include a lot of non-​destructive edit­ing fea­tures, I have always felt that Photoshop is a ter­ri­ble design and lay­out tool by its very nature as a raster based edi­tor. To me, any vec­tor based appli­ca­tion does a bet­ter job of any kind of lay­out than Photoshop as they are just much bet­ter suited to these kinds of tasks.

If Fireworks didn’t exist, I’d prob­a­bly have switched my Web design work­flow to Illustrator around the same time I dis­cov­ered Fireworks. It’s just quicker and more flex­i­ble for me but it may just boil down to what we feel com­fort­able with as well as our design styles.

I do agree with you about Fireworks CS3’s lack of UI improve­ments though. I used to be a rabid fan of the Macromedia inter­face but I have used and loved Adobe soft­ware for even longer. What I love in the new CS3 UI is that I think it has suc­cess­fully “melded” the best of both world in a way that is vastly supe­rior to any­thing both Macromedia and Adobe have done before. To me this is espe­cially true in InDesign and Illustrator.

Hopefully Fireworks will get the same treat­ment in CS4 and it may even­re­sult in more peo­ple adopt­ing it for a lot more than a mere ImageReady“replacement” which in my view is almost an insult to Fireworks