I love Photoshop. Okay, now that’s out of the way I can tell you about why I think every other web designer should consider checking out Adobe Fireworks for their next project. I realize this may be a touchy subject and that everyone is quite comfortable at the point using Photoshop and sometimes even Illustrator for web layouts. However, Fireworks is truly made for just this.

The first thing you’ll notice about Fireworks vs Photoshop is it’s ability to work with vector objects much better than Photoshop. I find this to be one of the biggest and best differences for me. This is extremely helpful when rapid prototyping projects and putting together wireframes.

I also love how Fireworks handles gradients over Photoshop. Giving you a simple handle to modify the direction and length of your gradients over the Photoshop guess and check method.

Another big deal for me is the Pages and States panels. When working on a large site it’s easy to get lost in Layers and constantly turning things on and off. With Pages you can easily setup a global layer that handles consistent elements like a primary nav, and then have a clean set of layers for each section of the site. I also find this functionality extremely helpful when brainstorming concepts and saving constant iterations through out the design process.

Another one of Fireworks big strengths is that it works very seamless into the Flash production workflow. You can copy a vector object from Fireworks and paste into Flash while retaining the vector object without having to create a bitmap, one of the first thing to wow our developers when introducing them to Fireworks for the first time.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the features in Fireworks that I use on a regular basis that improve my workflow and hopefully inspire some people to at least open it up and check it out. I think once you get used to it you’ll find it’s an amazing tool and hopefully integrate it as part of your web production process.