Optimizing The Design Workflow With Extensions

Ashish Bogawat has been using Adobe Fireworks for over a decade now and he recommends it to anyone searching for the optimal screen design workflow. Much has been said about Fireworks capabilities as a design application, but today he wants to focus on one of its other biggest strengths — its extensibility. As a platform, Fireworks gives its users a lot of freedom, when it comes to extending it. Because of that, Fireworks has a thriving ecosystem of add-ons (extensions) that add a lot of valuable functionality with newer options. In this article, Ashish Bogawat will try to list some of his top extensions for Fireworks.

John Dunning is a legend in the Fireworks community, and his growing list of powerful extensions often compete with themselves for the top spots as valuable and useful. His grids extension is unquestionably the first one Ashish Bogawat reaches out for every time he starts a new project. In a nutshell, the extension lets you set up a grid for your design. You set the parameters (the column width, gutter width, number of columns, etc.) and it then creates a locked layer with the columns, rows and guides spanning the height of your canvas. Since there are a couple of setups that he usually prefer to work with, he has saved them as presets, so it’s simply a matter of opening the panel and selecting an existing preset.