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Attaching Text To A Path

By default, when you type text into a Fireworks document, it is aligned to a straight horizontal line. However, you can get some nice looking effects by making the text follow an irregular line.

Reflected Text Tutorial

A popular technique used when creating logos is to create some text and then create the illusion that the text is sitting on a reflective surrface. The reflective surface creates … reflected text! This is a pretty easy tehnique to incorporate into your logos and takes next to no time to complete.

Creating A Logo For An MRSA Website

I recently had to create a logo for a website about MRSA symptoms. I had two initial ideas about what style the design should be:

* based on an image of the MRSA bacteria
* a vector not associated with MRSA at all

Pixelated Fireworks Tutorial

I know that there are some pixelating plugins available for Fireworks, but I thought I would attempt some pixelating effects with Fireworks CS4 straight out of the box, and with no outside help. So let’s begin. Create a new document at whatever size you like. Import (Ctrl-R) a bitmap image of your choosing. I used [...]

Create A Pool Ball In Fireworks

This tutorial makes extensive use of the skew tools to manipulate objects. First, create a new Fireworks document that is 200px wide and 200 px high. Leave the resolution at the default value. If you set the background colour to be #00592D, it will give the appearance that the pool ball is on the green [...]

Reducing Opacity To Create New Colours

We’re going to create a design with a dark and moody feel now. Create a new document 500 pixels by 500 pixels with a black background. To prepare the colours we are going to use, draw a red (#FF0000) square on top of a black square and reduce the opacity of the top red square. [...]

Create A Buy It Now Button

Recently I created a ‘Buy It Now’ button for a website and it had to blend in with that site’s colour scheme. I couldn’t just use my favourite colours, I had to choose colours that complemented those already used on the site. Blending In With An Existing Colour Scheme What I did was take an [...]

An Elliptical Logo

Create a new document that is 500 pixels by 500 pixels and has a white background. Draw an ellipse with a width of 200 pixels and a height of 120 pixels. Give it an ellipse gradient with a ‘white black’ preset fill. Position the gradient like this: Copy and paste the ellipse and scale it [...]

Gradients On Text

The next project demonstrates an easy but widely used techniques using text. Type the following text using the Aero font with a size of 100: We are going to give the text a linear gradient but first we need to decide which two colours to use. The design will be predominantly red so we will [...]

Convert Marquee to Path

One of the most useful additions to Fireworks 8 is the Convert Marquee to Path function. If you have a bitmap with area of high contrast, you can use the magic wand to make your selection and then convert it to a vector shape. This is what we will be doing in this project. Create [...]