Creating A Poster

How To Create A Poster In Fireworks

Today, just for fun, we're going to look at creating a "wanted" poster in Adobe Fireworks. If you want to print your poster, then another graphics application like Adobe Illustrator is probably a better tool for the job, but our poster is destined for the web. That makes Fireworks a good choice.

Start Fireworks and press ctrl-n to create a new document. The document size that we specify at this point isn't really important, as we can always change that later. All we need for now is enough room to work in. Set the Width and Height to be 400 px each and ensure that the canvas colour (the background colour) is white. Press Enter or click OK.

We now have a blank canvas in front of us.

First of all, let's choose a font that reminds us of the old wild west, where wanted posters were a bit more common. Click on the Text Tool button in the tools panel, and select the Playbill font. Increase the font size to around 70. Type out the word "Wanted" on your canvas.

Now let's import the image of the wanted person. I'm using a picture of Jim Morrison. Whichever image you choose, make sure that you have permission to use it first (read about Public Domain Images. To import an image into your document, press ctrl-r and navigate to the location of your image. Double click to select it.

If you need to resize the image, click the scale tool and drag one of the corner handles. Dragging the corners handles constrains the proportions of the image whereas dragging the handles along the edges squashes it.

Change back to the pointer tool by pressing v and drag the image to where you need it. I dragged it directly underneath the word "Wanted".

Now let's finish off with some text below the image that explains what the miscreant has done wrong. I ended up with this: