I’m an old school Dreamweaver user. I’ve been using it since the Macromedia days, starting out with version 2 in high school. Because it always tightly integrated into their suite of applications, I never had need to dust off Photoshop because I had Fireworks. It always served its purpose, but when Adobe bought Macromedia back in 2005 I figured my time was up. Adobe couldn’t possible maintain two separate image editors in their lineup, I thought, so I set out to try learning Photoshop so I wouldn’t be stuck using MS Paint when the other boot dropped.
Fast forward 5 years, and I still haven’t learned Photoshop and Adobe still hasn’t canned Fireworks. I guess I really wasn’t the only person out there using Fireworks, after all, despite the fact that I’ve never found another Fireworks user in my life. Still, it fits a niche and I guess Adobe is happy to fill it. Still, I’m drawn to Photoshop, if only for the truly amazing designs I’ve seen from people who use it. So, today I flipped open Photoshop and tried to design a simple one-page site for our email marketing service.
While I can appreciate the similarities between Fireworks and Photoshop in their CS5 iterations, they are only cosmetically similar. When it comes down to the actual operation, I was so lost it wasn’t funny. Eventually I figured out how the layers system works and managed to get the text tool to behave, even got a little fancy with the formatting, but it still wasn’t what I was expecting. Everyone who has scoffed at me using Fireworks has expounded endlessly on how wonderful Photoshop is and how easy it is to use. But, in my experience, I’ll stick with Fireworks for page design. The web slices and integration with Dreamweaver just makes it too good to pass up.
The result is here, and overall I’m pleased. I think it turned out well for my first shot at web design using Photoshop. Let me know what you think!