Fun with Fireworks…

I’m taking a class on how to use Adobe Fireworks more effectively, and thought I would share some recent work…

Here’s an experiment made with a photograph of a horse sculpture taken in Heidelberg, Germany in 2005:

Here’s how I made the above image…
On the horse picture, I started by using the Stamp tool to erase the support cables from the picture. Then I used the Auto Levels filter to balance the lights, darks and midtones of the image. I used the wand to create a cutout of the horse. To the horse, I added a Difference Color Fill blend (using a blue color) and added an orange glow offset by 5 pixels from the horse. I also gave him a red eye usiing an ellipse auto shape with a black-to-red radial fill.

After cutting out the horse, I cut out the sky and filled it with a contour fill, using the Violet-Orange Contour Gradient fill. I cut out the pedestrian walking in the street, turned him green, blurred him a little to hide some jagged edges, and added a green radioactive glow.

I added a Radial Blur to the background buildings and street to focus more attention on the horse. I then created about a dozen yellow stars using the autoshape star, donut and ellipse tools. I blurred them and made them slightly transparent so they would float in the background, and created a “sun” with a yellow glow using the autoshape ellipse tool.

Lastly, I created a Frame using the Bubbles Pattern fill, broke it apart with Modify/Paths/Split, and moved the frame layer above the Background layer, which effectively added a “bubble” effect to the sky.

Software stinks, but not for the reasons you’d think…

While I agree that most software is overly complicated, over-engineered and inelegant, I would argue the point that simple software costs less. In fact, in my experience, beautiful software designed for the end user is much more difficult to achieve, if it’s larger than a single-purpose system.

To further the metaphor, people have very specific expectations of a house. A house has to do one major thing – let a family live in it. Consider how much engineering it takes to design an office building, and how much more it costs to make an office building work for the number of types of people who occupy it. Now assume the office building has to be designed and built in half the time, with people who just started 3 weeks ago. Then consider the office building has to be occupied by 6 different companies, all of whom are too busy to tell you what they want. Cut the team in half, place unnecessary process controls on the whole project, and you get the typical software design project…

The best software is designed by the right people with very little waste. It’s the process that yields good software, not just the talent of the people involved.

On the flip side, well-designed software is worth the cost =]