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My Tutorial is on Devnet

By on March 16, 2006 in Design & Development

I should have blogged this a few days ago but bet­ter late than never…

I’ve had the plea­sure of hav­ing my Removing Image Backgrounds With Fireworks 8 tuto­r­ial pub­lished on Macromedia’s Developer Center. It is a great honor for me and I want to thank Stefan Gruenwedel from Macromedia for ask­ing me to pub­lish it and for guid­ing me through the process. Having pre­vi­ously worked on a Fireworks book (which was never pub­lished due to Glasshaus going bank­rupt) under insane dead­lines, I can say it was a plea­sure work­ing with Stefan and the edi­tors at Macromedia. You can find the (edited) tuto­r­ial here:

Removing Image Backgrounds With Fireworks 8

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6 Responses to My Tutorial is on Devnet

  1. Michel Bozgounov March 21, 2006 at 3:03 am #

    Congratulations:)

    Your tuto­r­ial deserved that! :-)

    I made it quite easy in 5 min­utes the first time, when I saw it on your web­site, so, it must be a good tutorial:)

    Now it’ll help even more peo­ple with Fireworks 8.

    *thumbs up*

    Keep up the good work!

    –M.

    Reply
  2. Michel Bozgounov March 21, 2006 at 3:03 am #

    PS And what about the book? Maybe you could re-​write it (if it needs a bit of revise), after all, and find a good pub­lisher? :-)

    Reply
  3. Stéphane March 22, 2006 at 12:03 pm #

    Well, it’s more com­pli­cated than that. The book had sev­eral writ­ers and I was involved in “only” two chap­ters (although both were over 13000 words long…). The book took you from the mockup/​design stage of a Web site lay­out to the slic­ing, opti­miza­tion and cod­ing of it. My con­tri­bu­tion was with the Slicing and the implementation/​coding parts. The book also had an empha­sis on best prac­tices so I used Dreamweavr to build the code struc­ture and only used code exported out of Fireworks for quick pro­to­typ­ing and show how much it sucked… ;-)

    If I take on that project again for myself I’ll need to start from scratch as the design wasn’t mine and although it looked great it was not at all my style.

    This is def­i­nitely on my to do list but it encom­passes a lot more than Fireworks and will require a lot of time. If I do it I’ll prob­a­bly try to sell it here as an eBook. Let,s just say that the pay for my con­tri­bu­tion to the orig­i­nal book would have been very small com­pared to the effort involved… ;-)

    Thanks again very much for your kind words Michel!

    Reply
  4. Michel Bozgounov April 4, 2006 at 10:04 am #

    Hm…

    Well, I see it’s com­pli­cated. But that’s maybe worth it… :-)

    For me, as I am xhtml/​css designer, I use Fireworks only to cre­ate the graph­ics I need. I do not do any slic­ing nor inside Dreamweaver, nor inside Fireworks. I sim­ply export images I need and then insert them in the web­page using CSS (as back­grund images) — using floats, rel­a­tive and absolute posi­tion­ing, etc.

    Slicing which is gen­er­ated by a pro­gram is always very messy and I pre­fer code all by myself :-)

    In this way, I know what hap­pens *exactly* in the code I have writ­ten, and if it actu­ally does some­thing, or is super­flu­ous and I can get rid of it ;-)

    Good luck! :-)

    I think, a book on Fireworks’ strong sides (vec­tors, web opti­miza­tion, ease of use) is much needed nowa­days, espe­cially for FW 8.

    See ya again soon on this site and elsewhere:)

    Michel

    Reply
  5. Stéphane April 4, 2006 at 1:04 pm #

    Michel,

    Just to be clear, slic­ing doesn’t mean using code from Fireworks. I never export any code from Fireworks either but I do slice the min­i­mal graph­ics I’ll need to recre­ate the lay­out in (X)HTML/CSS. I do my cod­ing in Dreamweaver or TopStyle Pro.

    I visu­ally lay­out page mock­ups in Fireworks then slice and opti­mize the parts I need and export only the images. That’s the process I explained in the book chapters.

    Reply
  6. Michel Bozgounov April 7, 2006 at 3:04 am #

    This is very good :-)

    I am doing some­thing sim­i­lar, I guess. I cre­ate the large image, and then select parts and repeat­ing back­grounds I may use, then export them, write CSS for their posi­tions on the page:)

    (Slicing some time ago meant a lot of extra­ne­ous stuff auto-​generated by some appli­ca­tion for web, so I apologize!)

    So, if this is what is/​were your book about, then maybe… I don’t know, you can sim­ply share some parts of it in another mode, like a tuto­r­ial or two?

    Or think about the Big Book again? :-)

    I never had in mind writ­ing a book, about what I do or what I have learnt so far. Maybe sim­ply a blog, with dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, a snip­pet or two, some exam­ples… Bad news is that lately I have so much work that I can’t even THINK about my own web­site, I’m just mak­ing web­sites for the com­pany I work… :( Maybe some day this will change :) ))

    Good luc to you! :)

    Reply

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