Creating Animation
Animated graphics add an exciting, sophisticated look to your website. In Adobe FireWorks, you can create animated graphics with banner ads, logos, and cartoons that move. For example, you can make your company mascot dance across a page while the logo fades in and out.
One way to create animations in Fireworks is by creating symbols and changing their properties over time to produce the illusion of motion. A symbol is like an actor whose movements you choreograph. The action of each symbol is stored in a frame. When you play all the frames together in a sequence, you get animation.
You can apply different settings to the symbol to gradually change the content of successive frames. You can make a symbol appear to move across the canvas, fade in or out, get bigger or smaller, or rotate.
Because you can have multiple symbols in a single file, you can create a complex animation in which different types of action occur all at once.
The Optimize panel lets you set optimization and export settings to control how your file is created. Fireworks can export animations as animated GIF or Flash SWF files. You can also import Fireworks animations directly into Adobe Flash for further editing.
This chapter contains the following topics:
Working with animation symbols
Working with existing animations
Using multiple files as one animation
