I’ve been considering a switch to Fireworks from Photoshop and other heavy editors for mocking up layouts.

With many of our projects, we’re skipping this step entirely.

On that note, see also Mockups with markup – Using Blueprint to sketch in code and Meagan Fisher’s fantastic piece, Make Your Mockup in Markup. For the Ruby-inclined, there’s a nice writeup on prototyping workflow, Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby, by the skilled UI designer Jérôme Gravel-Niquet.

That said, and even considering the pain of iterating mockups in a graphics editor, I still turn to them. Maybe I’m stuck in my ways. Maybe it’s just more fun.

The Fireworks Blueprint template

A Blueprint template was noticeably absent from the Fireworks arsenal (odd, because there’s even one for Balsamiq), so borrowing from the Photoshop template released by Konigi, I put a template together. It has vertical and horizontal guides and zebra-striped columns from the Photoshop template. Hope you find it useful.

Click to pull the full size image, which is the proper 24 columns across.

Onwards: a friend challenged me on my apparent loathing of all things variegated. I brushed it off, but it gnawed at me and I realized I’m not sufficiently open-minded when it comes to type. Not everything can be black, white and Helvetica.

I’m afraid that I don’t have the sources for these images, so if you spot them, please do leave a comment here or on Flickr. Alternatively, if you see a reason to pull them down, please do the same.

Examples of type in rainbow colors:

[flickr album=72157611578499310 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

Rainbow graphics:

[flickr album=72157611578499300 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

And some related posts on Abduzeedo:

http://abduzeedo.com/inspiration-archan-nair-badam-pista, http://abduzeedo.com/super-cool-abstract-vectors-illustrator-and-photoshop, http://abduzeedo.com/awesome-floral-type-fireworks-and-photoshop-5-minutes, http://abduzeedo.com/clever-logos