Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks?, For web wireframes and design Options

[clung3]

I've done some googling on the topic, and it's a mixed bag. My guess is it comes down to preference. But looking around, it seems Fireworks has a lot of advantages.

After reading this article I am tempted to give it a go. Probably for points one and two:

1. Familiar Adobe Interface: Many of the interface features and behaviors are similar to other Adobe products like Illustrator, InDesign, and Flash. Fireworks even has some of the tools that I feel have been missing from Photoshop, like directly selecting layers with the Pointer, easily adjusting Fill color of any object or text, and precision editing of vector objects.

2. Multiple Pages: Similar to InDesign you can create a Master Page which you can link to your other Pages. This concept is perfect for web design templates since generally there should be a consistent structure to website design. Fireworks also makes it very easy to share layers with other pages or even export to other documents.

On the other hand, there's the Illustrator crowd. I have access to Illustrator at work (I am in Pre-press, so we use Adobe CS, just not Adobe CS Premium) - meaning I could use Illustrator without the need to go out and purchase Fireworks.

Has anyone here who works in web design and/or development had experience with all three? Which do you prefer and why? What is easier for developers to work with once it's up to the cutting stage? And if I were to create my design in Illustrator (for me, the interface is just a lot more efficient than PS) would I need to convert it to photoshop after to do the cutting? Or is that easily done in Illustrator?

[Girvo]

Without going too much into it, I prefer Fireworks personally for the work I do :)

[clung3]

Without going too much into it, I prefer Fireworks personally for the work I do :)

What do you like about it compared to the other options?

This section needs more love :(

[Girvo]

I just got Fireworks CS5 running under Wine on Ubuntu, I'll do a small write-up as to my workflow with this new project, it should explain why i prefer it :)

And yeah, this section is a bit forlon unfortunately.

[Harmonic Cacopho...]

I've used Fireworks for everything since I don't know, 2005. Never used it for professionally sort of stuff though. It just does enough for most situations without requiring a whole bunch of faffing through millions of lists and options to do so.