Tags to Richness

At my job I have to be the web designer, the print designer and the flash animator.  So it’s easier for me to stay in the one drawing tool that makes the transition between those tasks easiest.

That doesn’t mean I’m poo-poo-ing Fireworks, I’m not.  Fireworks is freakin’ awesome.  It’s just not the best tool for my specific role at my company.  But rest assured I spend time in Fireworks weekly so I’m ready for the day when I work at a company that has Fireworks as it’s primary work flow tool.

So until that day, here are the main reasons I still prefer Illustrator over Fireworks.

1. I’m always Flash ready.  If I’m always in Illustrator then I’m always sharpening my vector drawing skills, which means I’m always ready to create artwork for Flash.  Bitmaps do not work in Flash for the simple reason that they are HUGE in file size, let alone the fact that you lose all the transformation abilities of a vector image.

2. I’m always Printer ready.  We all know bitmaps make horrible printing compared to vector illustrations.  Besides that, who would ever work in 300 dpi when they are doing web design?  Maybe the iPhone’s retina display will change this.

3. It’s the best damn 2D vector tool out there.  People always tell me “But Fireworks does vector too!”  That’s like saying WordPad lets you write term papers just like MS Word.  Yea Fireworks does vector, but why would I purposefully hurt myself like that?

4. I’m just way f-ing fast in it.  I spend time every week trying to make myself just as fast in Fireworks, but you can’t argue with the speed I can go in Illustrator.  I’m definitely at that point where there is no delay between idea in my head to realized drawing in Illustrator.  It will take years to get that fast in Fireworks.

I don’t know about your job, but at my company our product owners change their minds what seems like every week.  And sometimes they change their mind twice a week.  So my lead time to design is practically zilch depending on the project.  I’ve adapted to this by working solely out of Illustrator.  For me I can “sketch” faster in illustrator then on paper or any other application.  So I can crank out great-enough (I say great enough because they aren’t slop, but they aren’t 110% perfect either) designs for the developers in a matter of hours, and then write up design docs in minutes.  It’s quick and dirty but it’s the only way I can keep design in the loop with the way things are at the moment.

I say all that because while designing my latest portfolio update I finally let myself design pixel perfect again, this time using Fireworks.  I say “again”, because there was a time long ago when I used ImageReady and Photoshop to make each design pixel perfect.  This time I told myself there was no deadline, just make it perfect no matter how long it takes.  And I must say it’s been incredibly liberating to draw that puppy dot by dot till it’s totally perfect.  Could I get away with this on the job?  Not so sure.  But my friends who use Fireworks say it is possible the faster you get with Fireworks.

I was working on the fine details for my 2010 portfolio design when I decided I wanted to put in some perfect 1 pixel lines through out the design.  I tried creating 1px rectangles in Illustrator but realized this level of pixel precision was very tedious and sloppy in Illustrator and would be so much easier to do in Fireworks.

So chalk one up for Fireworks.  Illustrator was a great tool for designing the concept to a mid-range level of detail.  I find Illustrator is still much faster the Fireworks when it comes to throwing around and refining ideas.  But to get the final pixel perfect precision I want (like what you would see on BestWebGallery) I realized I had to do the final design in Fireworks.

Since December of 2009 I’ve been forcing myself to use Adobe Fireworks CS4 to redesign my portfolio.  I’m a die-hard Illustrator user when it comes to all my interaction design work.  I am extremely fast in Illustrator and can crank out low to high fidelity work very quickly.

I’ve been hearing from a lot of other Interaction Designers that Fireworks is the way to go, over Illustrator.  But so far Fireworks is significantly slower for me because of the simple fact that in Fireworks I typically “find” something by looking through all the layers, whereas in Illustrator I simply click on the object I’m trying to reach.  This alone nearly triples the amount of time and frustration it takes me to use Fireworks and to me is very counter-intuitive.

But the jury is still out.  I still need to create a full set of wireframes in Fireworks rather then a single page design to see if the workflow savings are significant enough.