In General Feb 26, 20109
Whats Better For Designing A Website, Photoshop Or Fireworks?
This week a contentious and highly debatable question was asked on Answers and, as expected, we received a lot of great answers favorable for both sides. We felt it was such a good question that we are opening it up to our trusty Design Reviver readers to hopefully settle the issue.
So, here goes… What’s Better For Designing A Website, Photoshop Or Fireworks?
The original question was asked by Angela last Monday, and has so far received a hand-full of answers (you can read them below). We would love to hear your opinion, you can post it in the comments below or you can post an answer on the original questions thread here: What's Better For Designing A Website, Photoshop Or Fireworks?
“Have you asked a question yet?“
What's Better For Designing A Website, Photoshop Or Fireworks?
Answer from Alessio:
That’s a good question! I believe that it mostly comes down to personal preference.
I would use Photoshop because I’m much more comfortable with it and it’s quick and easy.
The reasons that Fireworks could be better, though, are:
1) It integrates rasters and vectors well, which you will probably want to do when creating a website.
2) It has better image compression, which can be important when creating graphics for the web. See this article: webdesignerwall.com for an in-depth comparison of the image compression in Photoshop and Fireworks.So, I think for the most part it depends on whatever you’re more comfortable with, but there are slight advantages to Fireworks.
Answer from Mohamed Aslam Najeebdeen :
I use Photoshop for create mockups and Fireworks for wireframes and image slicing and optimization.
Answer from interface.net.pk:
It depends on your personal preference. The more you use a tool, the more comfortable you’d b with it. By the way, photoshop is believed to be the best application for designing websites.
Answer from Max:
Fireworks is the best, I’ve been using it since version 3. I use Photoshop for anything I do with my tablet.
Answer from Michael Lajlev:
I think you should go with photoshop, because it contains all you need, and sometimes fireworks isnt enough. If you go with photoshop you only need to learn one interface.
Unanswered Questions
There are always a couple of questions that somehow manage to go unanswered, can you help?
These are this weeks orphans:
- What Tool Would You Choose To Create A Social Network?
- How Can I Convert My Illustrations To Animations?
- How Do I Parse My XML?
- What's The Best Free Tool To Track Your Time On Projects?
Thanks again to everyone that took the time to offer some helpful and useful answers.
9 Comments
Feb 26, 2010
I personally use fireworks for 99% of my projects, however i’m starting to use pixelmator more as well, which is a much better (and cheaper) alternative to PS.
Feb 26, 2010
Always found both to be very very similar, so much so, that i have never understood why Adobe haven’t just merged the 2 together.
Personal choice for me would be Photoshop.
Feb 26, 2010
[...] Direct Link [...]
Feb 26, 2010
It’s personal preference. For web ui’s both do the same thing.
Fireworks was rebuilt for web design and Photoshop is a more powerful all purpose app. kind of like using a nuke to kill a fly.
but like i say, its preference… best designer i know uses Fireworks.
Feb 26, 2010
I used both for different things. Photoshop is great for, well, photos and other raster images, but fireworks is really great with vector images pulled in from illustrator. When I’m cutting images while coding, I prefer to use Fireworks because I can select and copy by just pointing and clicking on the images instead of digging through the layers. Fireworks has a great batch processing option too.
Overall, though, I believe its personal preference. When designing, its really best to use the tool you’re most comfortable with… but, when coding, I would suggest exporting from Fireworks. Its just easy…
Feb 26, 2010
Fantastic site! I’m so happy I “chanced” upon it. I’ll spread the word!
Mar 2, 2010
I use Photoshop only because it’s what I’ve always used and Fireworks is based off of Macromedia’s original interface. Certain things are now a pain in the butt in PS though ever since they got rid of ImageReady. I personally wish they would have kept ImageReady.
Mar 3, 2010
I prefer Fireworks, but probably just because my photoshop skills aren’t what they should be
Mar 9, 2010
I use firworks for Web graphics and design while photoshop for print graphics since it has CMYK mode aside from RGB mode. Just recently learned photoshop and the interface isn’t really that hard or confusing (as I thought before) now since I’m already familiar with fireworks which has a bit similarity with ps. all in all, both are great.
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