Using The Texture Panel in Adobe Fireworks

Texture panel enables you to work more easily with textures

When you’re working in Fireworks — be it for a website design, mobile design or graphic asset for a project — one need you will undoubtedly have is support for textures. While Fireworks is an amazing tool in other areas, the usability of the textures feature could definitely be improved. In this article, Matt Curtis will look at an extension that does just that — the Texture Panel.

 

Currently in Fireworks, you can apply textures (which are pulled from your “Textures” folder) to whatever vector shape you’re working on. Unfortunately, the way Fireworks lists textures isn’t as intuitive (or fast) as it could be. As it is, you’re presented with a text listing of all of your textures. When you mouse over a name, a preview window of that texture pops up, but there is no easy way to get to or to quickly identify your most commonly used textures, and if you often use a lot of textures, your workflow can get cramped a bit. So, Matt Curtis said “Why not? It’ll be fun!”, and started developing his own extension. He wanted to create something that would do the following:

  • Sort textures into lists
  • Optionally display the textures as thumbnails
  • Provide an intuitive interface to manipulate textures
  • Allow you to add your own textures and refresh the current list

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