Joshua Mauldin started with style guides like any other obsessive-compulsive designer: with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. Plus, knowing which component to use in a given situation is nice, too, right? Since making this a regular practice, he has found it’s been like having a nice combination of a CSS class and a pattern library all in one.
One of the first questions, understandably, is why use Fireworks for a style guide? Well, for him, it’s mostly because of symbols and styles. Sure, you could use similar things in Photoshop, but he finds Fireworks’ implementation to be smarter.
![](downloads/images/style-guide-intro.png)
Here’s why he loves it:
- Symbols update everywhere, and you have to update them only once.
- Symbols have states, which let you easily show things such as selected and unselected states.
- Symbols may be placed on a single page for easy editing.
- If the styles are for the Web, you can easily export them as CSS.
This article is all about understanding why you would want to set up a style guide using Fireworks, and you’ll also get a little starter template that I like to use.
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