One of the most useful tools in many desktop graphic applications is the pen tool. The pen tool allows you to draw straight or smooth vector lines, plotting out points on the canvas that are joined by paths. Take a square as a simple example: each corner is a vector point with paths inbetween those points that repesent the straight edges of the square.

The pen tool allows you to draw simple shapes such as the square but with a little practice you’ll be able to draw any complex shape you want as if you were drawing with a pen by hand. Furthermore, as your complex shapes are made up of vector points and paths, you’ll be able to go back and edit your shape at any time and point as well as resize it without losing any quality in the shape.

Our Adobe Fireworks Pen Demonstration

Keep on reading to find our downloadable pen tool tutorial for Adobe Fireworks as well as many hints and tips on how to better use the pen tool.

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Peeling stickers and page curls are a very popular Web 2.0 style that make your images look like their coming off of the screen!

Creating Peeling Stickers and Page Curls

Using Adobe Fireworks we’re going to show you have easy it is to make peeling stickers and this technique can be used in the exact same way for making page curls too! In this tutorial we’ll cover linear fill options, the subselection tool and the slice tool - it’s that easy!

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Having followed our previous blog post: “How do I upload my Website using Dreamweaver?“, we know how to set up a site definition and connect Dreamweaver to our web server. We have our local files (the files on our computer) listed in the Files toolbar and we’re ready to start uploading and editing when we need to do so.

If you don’t have any local files. Let’s make a very quick web page just to get started. Feel free to skip this next paragraph if your website is ready to upload.

Using the File Toolbar

Click ‘File’ > ‘New’ and then click ‘Blank Page’ and ‘HTML’ > ‘none’. We can then click ‘Create’ to open a blank webpage. Simply put a little bit of content into this page (we’re going to type “Hello World!” in ours). When you are happy with the content click ‘File’ > ‘Save’. We need to save this file where we told Dreamweaver our local files we’re stored in the previous tutorial. We used a folder found at: ‘C:\Documents and Settings\ITMDesign\Desktop\localhost’, so let’s save it there. You should then see the file appear in your Files toolbar as shown above. It is important to note that if this page you have just created is going to be the first page of your website you should save it as ‘index.html’. Whenever someone visits ITMDesign.co.uk (or whatever your website address is) their browser knows ‘index’ will be the first page to display.

Now let’s upload it!

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