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Design Aid Kit 2 Razzle Dazzle E Book

Razzle dazzle is a no-hand-holding, straight out recipe book for some of the terrific visual effects you can achieve in Fireworks. The program Help files show you how to operate the software. The objective of this Kit is to show you how to solve problems and communicate to you the sheer fun you can have with Fireworks while working toward your artistic goals. The effort you put into working through these exercises is repaid by the rapid development of skills used by Web designers every day. Some are simple, some are fiddly, but all are great fun.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Easy toon text
Create a chunky text style right out of a Flintstones cartoon
More easy toon text
Un-skew text to make it lean out from the page
Easy 3D text
Build it in any direction. Learn a new shadow trick.
3D variation 1
How a shadow can be a highlight. One of many uses of the Distort tool.
3D variation 2 – Cracked Stone
Drawing with the eraser. A visit with the Brightness/Contrast dialog box. Treat a pattern fill to a tint and blend job.
Ice text
Create an icy gradient. Cast shadows and glows. Control Edge properties. Create an icy atmosphere. Mirror it in black ice. Pulling icicles.
Neon text
Shadow and Glow with offsets to fool the eye.
Chiseled stone text
Emboss a base. Distort a pattern fill and chisel its edges.
Simple metallic text
Have you Kerned lately? Skew a pattern. A horizontal flip.
Travel poster text
Each letter a different color without having to type them separately. Mask those letters. Numeric Transform.
Illustrator’s gold text
Create a golden style. Polish and bevel. Add a rainbow wash.
Funky glowing text
Retro style from a late 1930’s b-movie poster.
Graffiti wall Smears on a brick wall.
A funky gradient with tricky bevel. A Fireworks adjustment layer.
Alien runes
Build a stainless steel wall. Give the wall a seam. Make something leak from the seam. Give it a heat stain. Scratch it. Embed a cartouche in it. Add weird alien looking characters.
Glass Bubble
Three methods for building glassy bubbles.
Tree ornament
Turn a glassy bubble into a satiny Christmas tree ornament, complete with aluminum clip and hanger. Add a spectral light and vignette.
Elevator buttons
Turn glassy bubbles into 3D buttons with embossed numbers
Classy glassy thought balloon
You know. The one next to the little yellow guy.
Tabbed pod with glassy buttons
Make glassy tabs and gradient tabs, then mix them up and make them toggle.
Convert it to a seamless tile
Slice an image, and re-deal it into a perfectly seamless tile.
Cadillac Café background
Ragged edge EZ knock out mask
Use the new replace color tool and a crafty Alpha trick to separate an object with complex edges from its background.
Illumination effect
Take any photo and cast a rainbow colored beam of light across it without a special lighting plug-in.
Collage
Create a foxed, folded, crinkled sheet of paper. Edge a photo. Create the sticky tape to tape the paper and photo to your desktop.
Window on the world
Punch multiple shapes through a rectangle. A punched rectangle becomes a window frame. The window fame creates a clear view, through a mist, to a sunny beach
Age of machines navbar
Create graphics for a Web page that evokes the atmosphere of a late, Victorian age steam ship. Slice and export. Rebuild the page in Dreamweaver, adding the behaviors that make the navbar light up, creating a CSS style sheet, and some fancy table borders along the way.
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