Meetings

Fire on the Bay will usually meet the third Tuesday of each month.

If you would like to speak, sponsor or suggest a topic please contact manager@fireonthebay.org.

Current Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 6:30pm
  • Speakers: Dave Hogue, Christian Baptiste
  • Topic: Multi-Page Designs and Export Options
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Can't Make it to San Francisco? Watch the broadcast here
    http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/fotbmar10/

We'll be exploring how to create multi-page documents in Fireworks (using a Master Page and shared layers) to create storyboards for interactive web pages, then look at export options,including:

  • - emailing bitmaps
  • - Flash slide shows
  • - PDF
  • - Screensharing with Adobe Connect
  • - HTML and CSS export.

We'll also discuss how to create more effective and useful PDFs from within Fireworks, including exporting one or all pages, replacing pages in a PDF, commenting in a PDF to collect feedback, making a PDF click-through, and sharing files via Acrobat.com.

Finally, we'll re-visit how to export prototype code from Fireworks using:

  • - Export HTML and Images
  • - Export CSS and Images.
As always, bring your ideas, your questions, and your friends. See you there!

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Fire-On-The-Bay/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 6:30pm
  • Speaker: Gilberto Medrano, Dave Hogue, Christian Baptiste, Luke Kilpatrick and More
  • Topic: How do I do that in Fireworks
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)

Join Us for Pizza, and fun with a round table and demo of what ever fireworks features you want to learn about.

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Fire-On-The-Bay/


Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 6:30pm
  • Speaker: Luke Kilpatrick
  • Topic: Choosing the right tool for the Job - Why you should be using Fireworks
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't Make it to San Francisco? Watch the recording here
    http://bit.ly/7cmMoI

Luke Kilpatrick has been organizing this usergroup for over 2 years now and has never spoken as the main speaker.

This will not be a why Photoshop Sucks presentation, Photoshop is a great tool, but it is often the incorrect choice when doing design for the web or for other screens. Many many long time users of Fireworks share this view.

This session will cover many of the key advantages Fireworks excels at when you are designing pixels for the screen more than any other software on the market.

If you are wondering why you should be using Fireworks to do your design work over Photoshop, or Illustrator then this is a don't miss session for you.

If you have a key feature or something you would like shown in this presentation please put it into the comments.

Also please thank Pivotal Labs for sponsoring Pizza this month.

Luke Kilpatrick has been building and designing leading edge web sites since 1996. Since graduating from the Digital Media Technical Production program at Seneca College, North York, Ontario in 2001. Luke has worked for companies based in Wisconsin, Illinois and California. Writing ColdFusion code for a diverse range of companies such as Kohler, Tripp-lite, Broadchoice, Design within Reach, and ODA has given Luke a well rounded view of many industries businesses. Luke is also the current manager of Fire On The Bay, an Adobe Fireworks user group as well as the Co-Manager of Photoshop Till You Drop, a Photoshop Usersgroup, both usergroups serve the San Francisco Bay Area. When he is not coding he can usually be found surfing in Half Moon Bay, CA.


Previous Meeting

Join us as Visual Designer Gilberto Medrano shows how to use Adobe Fireworks to create web site designs. He will demonstrate his favorite techniques and explain how he uses various features of Fireworks to go from a sketch to production ready graphics.

Gilberto is a senior designer at Engine Yard Inc. in San Francisco. With a background in architecture, Gilberto became interested on software product design back in 1998, and has been applying his experience in the architectural design process to this medium since then. His passion for design gave him the opportunity to work and live in several countries such as Israel, India, Costa Rica and US.

Gilberto is an advocate for a holistic and Agile approach towards product design and implementation, wearing multiple hats across several UX disciplines and doing front-end engineering to ensure proper design integration. He has experience creating products based on technologies like RubyOnRails, Eclipse, .NET and Drupal. Fireworks has been his "swiss-army-knife" tool for anything related to design for the last 10 years, for both interaction and visual design.

When he is not hypnotized by the monitor, he enjoys spending time with his greater passion: his loving wife and his cute little daughter.


Previous Meeting

Learn how to plan a web page structure and think deliberately about the layout of the content and design elements. We will cover how to use Fireworks to plan, organize, and design web pages that can be exported as CSS and HTML.

This is a preview of the MAX 2009 Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL) sessions that I will be conducting at MAX 2009 in Los Angeles in October.

Please bring your laptops with Fireworks CS4 installed (You can follow along and watch if you cannot bring a laptop, but this is intended to be a hands-on demo.) We will provide copies of the working files at the start of the meeting.

(For remote people, we will try to post them for access prior to the meeting, but since this is a MAX 2009 preview, we cannot make the files publicly available until October 8, so please do not share or publish the demo files.)

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, July 21st, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker:Arena Reed and Luke Kilpatrick
  • Topic:Web Workflows with Some Surprises!
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't Make it to San Francisco? Watch the recording here
    http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p43497214/

Double Speaker session of Fireworks prototyping goodness!

First up Arena will be sharing the process she uses to create interactive prototypes with Fireworks as well as explaining how it fits into the process of creating a web application with an agile development team.

Then Luke Kilpatrick will continue on with his prototype that he created for building43, skinning it for Fire On The Bay as well as building a comparable application mock up for the Palm Pre.


Special thanks to Yelp! for sponsoring pizza this month!

From Yelp!:
We love Fireworks at Yelp and we are looking for a new product manager! Our PMs do everything from design to release of their features. We need a unique combination of technical skills and strong design intuition. Below is the full job description. If you are interested in applying, please submit your application through www.yelp.com/jobs.

P.S. Members of our team will be attending the July 21st meeting and are happy to talk with folks then. Hope to see you there!
--
Susan Loh
Yelp Recruiter
sloh@yelp.com
415.632.5433
We're hiring: www.yelp.com/jobs

About our speakers

Arena Reed
is Lead User Experience Designer at Grockit, a startup practicing Agile Design & Development to create an online learning game where people learn by teaching each other. Previously, Arena was Lead Designer at Pivotal Labs, the makers of Pivotal Tracker, an Agile planning tool. Arena uses a variety of tools and techniques to communicate designs, one of her favorite tools is Adobe Fireworks, which she uses for prototyping. Fireworks is her tool of choice due to the combination of vector and raster graphics and the ease in which it allows her to make changes to interactive prototypes.


Luke Kilpatrick
has been building and designing leading edge web sites since 1996. Since graduating from the Digital Media Technical Production program at Seneca College, North York, Ontario in 2001. Luke has worked for companies based in Wisconsin, Illinois and California. Before joining Broadchoice full time in March 2008, Luke had been contracting with Broadchoice on ColdFusion projects since 2004. Working with a diverse range of companies such as Kohler, Tripp-lite, Broadchoice, Design within Reach, and ODA has given Luke a well rounded view of many industries businesses and how ColdFusion powered websites and applications can meet their needs. Luke is also the current manager of Fire On The Bay, an Adobe Fireworks user group as well as the Co-Manager of Photoshop Till You Drop, a Photoshop Usersgroup, both usergroups serve the San Francisco Bay Area. He will also be presenting at Adobe Max 2009 in October.


Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, April 21st, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker:Scott Fegette
  • Topic:Web Workflows with Some Surprises!
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Can't make it to San Francisco, please attend via connect
    http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/fotbapril/

RSVP: http://webdesign.meetup.com/485/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, March 17th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker:
    Many Speakers on many topics with Q and A
  • Topic:
    Should be a fun meeting with a few presenters covering different aspects of using FW on daily basis for designing a variety of things.
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please check out our recording
    http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p54448946/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, February 17th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: Al Abut
  • Topic:Website Prototyping with Fireworks
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please check out our recording
    http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p13197444/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: Alan Musselman and others!
  • Topic: Fireworks Jam Session and Fireworks 10th Anniversary Party!
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)

With MAX taking place in San Francisco this year we are going to be having a Jam session with Alan Musselman, Aaron Bealle and many more! Give aways of the new Fireworks CS4 Book as well as our Grand Prize Drawing for a copy of CS4 Web Premiumn.

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: Doug Winnie
  • Topic: Adobe Creative Suite Workflows
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please check out our recording
    http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p85411535/

Doug Winnie will be presenting his fantastic talk on Designer and Developer workflows across the adobe product wheel of products. He presented this back in May and it features Fireworks as the glue in the middle of the web designer/developers tool box.

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: Storm Bear Williams
  • Topic: Fireworks to draw and illustrate cartoons
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please watch our recording via connect
    http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p90931080/

Storm Bear Williams has been involved in interactive marketing and advertising since 1990 - you know, the good old days. Currently he serves as the Group Creative Director of Nimbus World Group, an ad agency that specializes in virtual world development and social media marketing. He draws the political cartoon "Town Called Dobson" to keep from throwing things at the television.

SEPTEMBER PRESENTATION
Storm Williams will present how he uses Fireworks to draw and illustrate his political cartoon, "Town Called Dobson." Starting from a character and through to copywriting and strip completion.

Williams will autograph your favorite TCD strip during after the presentation. Just print it out and bring it in..

Town Called Dobson can be found at - http://www.towncalleddobson.com/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: John Nack
  • Topic: Adobe Bridge
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please watch our recording via connect
    http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p84207439/

John Nack is Principal Manager for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Bridge. Prior to joining Adobe John was a Web designer and animator at AGENCY.COM New York, where we developed online content for clients such as Gucci, Nike, British Airways, and Coca-Cola. That experience convinced him that design tools could and had to be better, leading him to join Adobe in 2000, working on the Web animation tool LiveMotion. John has been on the Photoshop team since 2002 and has worked on features such as Adobe Camera Raw, Smart Objects, Vanishing Point, the File Browser, and Adobe Bridge.

Johns's Blog can be found at - http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/

RSVP: http://webdesign.meetup.com/485/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: Christian Baptiste
  • Topic: Fireworks is adaptable to different workflow styles - tips and tricks to speed up yours, for all levels of users.
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please watch the recording via connect
    http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p24223988/

Christian Baptiste brings a vast array of talents to the San Francisco Bay Area web community. He is a designer/developer with emphasis on interaction and usability.

Always on the forefront of new technologies, his work has won him several awards for his innovative designs. Christian's portfolio includes some of the largest Internet and software companies in the world. He has built web based software/sites, cd's, e-marketing material and customized e-commerce packages for companies like, Roxio, Sonic, Dell, Microsoft, HP, Digital River, Siebel, Curious labs, SearchForce, AOL, Odigo, SKYY Vodka, E-Greetings, American Greetings, Blue Mountain Arts, as well as some the top Internet dating sites like Match, Matchmaker, Udate, Community Connect, and many more.

Christian has been a long time evangelist for Macromedia and Adobe products. You can find Christian in the forums under the name Christian3D. He also occasionally does product demonstrations showing product tips and tricks, and sharing his custom Fireworks and Dreamweaver commands, textures, styles, patterns, snippets and tutorials.

Christian is currently working for SearchForce, Inc. When designing SearchForce's innovative Flex interface, Christian paid close attention to a PPC (Pay Per Click) manager's day to day tasks. The result is that SearchForce provides advertisers with the tools to quickly, efficiently and effectively manage complex search marketing campaigns.

Christian's most recent portfolio can be found at - http://visionarydesigners.com/

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 6:45pm
  • Speaker: David M. Hogue
  • Topic: Prototyping With Fireworks
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it to San Francisco, please enjoy the recording
    http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p57401248/

Dave Hogue, Director of Information Design & Usability at Fluid, will be showing how the information and interaction design team uses Fireworks for wireframing and prototyping for their high end ecommerce projects and rich internet application experiences. He will show example prototypes and demonstrate how they design and create basic slideshows, simple click-throughs, and interactive prototypes to test more complex workflows and interaction designs. The demonstration and discussion will be conversational, and attendees are encouraged to participate, ask questions, and offer suggestions for other ways Fireworks may be used by information and interaction designers.

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 6:30pm
  • Speaker:Rick Jones, Product Manager for Fireworks
  • Topic:Fireworks NEXT!! whats new and cool
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)
  • Couldn't make it watch the recording. http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p65485923/

We are going to be given the first public demo of the new features of the next version of Fireworks!!

  • Great Prizes including CS3 Web Premiumn


About our Speakers

Shadowy figures that loom in the night that get lit by fireworks to come out of the shadows to share fanstasic news.

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 6:30pm
  • Speaker:Making Fireworks kuler
  • Topic: Tim Strickland
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Conference Room)
  • If you couldn't make it to San Francisco please watch the recording on connect: https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p63457132/ - Audio is fixed, Tim Presented again at the Jam Session

Making Fireworks kuler:

  • kuler overview
  • What's new in kuler 2.0
  • Prototyping kuler 2.0 with Fireworks
  • kuler 3rd party APIs & applications


About our Speaker

Tim Strickland is a senior computer scientist for Adobe's Emerging Creative Technologies group. He is the lead developer for kuler, a web-hosted application that is all about color: color for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing. Kuler enables novice and advanced designers to find, share and post colors and color themes and connects the Adobe community. Although Tim's primary focus is on kuler's backend development, his background is in User Interface design, which he has taken advantage of to do mock-ups in Fireworks of new functionality & features for kuler which he has successfully handed off to front-end flash developers to implement.

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, February 19th, 2007 7:00pm
  • Speaker: Trevor McCauley
  • Topic: 10 coolest features of Fireworks
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Kojack Conference Room)

Trevor McCauley, of Adobe and author of Senocular.com will showing 10 coolest features of Fireworks CS3

About our Speaker

Trevor McCauley is a quality engineer on the Flash Player team at Adobe Systems Incorporated. During the 2 years he has been working at Adobe, he has supported the Fireworks team in his spare time with contributions such as the MXML and Images export. Before that he worked as a web developer for 4 years at a production company in Maryland where the Macromedia Studio products were his tools of choice. His personal site, senocular.com, to hosts free tutorials, source files, and extensions for both Flash and Fireworks.

We will also be giving away a copy of Fireworks CS3 to a lucky winner.


If you couldn't make it to San Francisco please watch the recording on connect: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p21558287/

Broadchoice.com is very kindly sponsoring Pizza and Drinks please check out their Digital Marketing Manager at http://www.broadchoice.com

Previous Meeting

  • Date: Monday, January 21th, 2007 7:00pm
  • Speaker: Ted Patrick, Adobe Platform Evangelist
  • Topic: Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour with Adobe's Ted Patrick
  • Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 (Chaplin Conference Room)

This is a Joint meeting between 3 Bay Area Usegroups.

Join users from Bay Area Coldfusion Usergroup (BACFUG) and Bay Area Application Developer Adobe User Group (BAADAUG) and Fire On The Bay for a night of cool things you can do with FLEX and AIR. Also there will be giveaways and food as well.

From The BACFUG website

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Ted Patrick from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium at this event!

RSVP: http://webdesign.meetup.com/485/
(This meeting is past the security barrier at Adobe so you must RSVP!!)

Previous Meeting

  • Date: November 20th, 2007 7:00pm
  • Speaker: Logo / Site Mock Up Entrants
  • Topic: How and Why did this in my Design entry.

We announced our winner for the Web site design contest.

Aaron who designed a great logo and site, did a great presentation on how and why he did his design as well as giving a great display of the blend modes.

Here is his winning design:
http://www.fireonthebay.org/contestgallery/processed/fire.jpg

I also want to thank Christian and Wes for giving demos and talking about how they did their entries.

You can see all of the designs at:
http://www.fireonthebay.org/contestgallery/

Over the next few weeks we will make the Fire on the Bay web site look much better.

If you couldn't make it onto the connect room or couldn't make it to SF you can watch the connect recording at:
http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p49432435/

I also wanted to thank our sponsors:
Adobe, lyris inc, iStock photo, and Peachpit please visit these sponsors from the Fire on the Bay site and let them know where you heard about them.

Danielle and Rob came all the way from Barrie, Ontario Canada to help out the group with presenting some of their products and how fireworks can be used with them, they also provided great pizza and our monthly grand prize of an iPod touch. So a big thank you to them for being so generous and making the effort to come here from the great white north.

For the grand prize of the iPod, it was won by Angela D.

Also we had a drawing for a bunch of othe great swag so no one left home empty handed (except me that didn't have to haul stuff back to the car )

Previous Meeting

  • Date: October 23rd, 2007 7:00pm
  • Speaker: Alan Musselman - A Member of Adobe's Fireworks Team
  • Topics Covered:
    • Intro to Alan and Fireworks
    • Random Tip 001
    • Rich Symbols and how to make them

This meeting was recorded on Adobe Connect. You can view the Connect Session here: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/fireonthebay/

Raffle winners:

  • 1 nights stay at The Block Hotel in South Lake Tahoe. - Jennifer Q.
  • Cf United Backpack - Matt D.