It’s always been of a great interest for me to study how the web design develops in different countries of the world. There are lots of different approaches and techniques and though there are overall network tendencies like web 2.0, big fonts, clean layouts etc there’s always a great opportunity to see something unique. I’m not really sure what it depends on, the country economy, the average age of people, the number of creative people and way of communication. There has been many articles and showcases on the web devoted to Russian designers and design studios and as a rule, we can see a very special styles and approaches. One strange thing just came to my mind: though I live in Ukraine, I don’t know any design studio in here! In the post today I decided to make things right and to make a small research.

Frankly speaking I was embarrassed. I’ve actually made 2 researches, the first one – overall on the web to find out whether there are some recognized designers and design studios from Ukraine and the second one was the local. I went to Google and typed “web design studio” to see what studios will show up in the first 3 pages of search results. My assumption was, and which is quite obvious, that to be on those first pages you both have to put some efforts into search engines optimization and at the same time stand out from the crowd. While the personal portfolios from the first experimental group was a pleasure to the eye, the second one was a total disaster. Almost all of the websites I was opening were ugly, outdated, crowded with information and gave me the feeling like I’m in the early 2000s.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this and what’s the situation in your country. My guess is that all talented designers have work either for USA or Europe as the internet business here in Ukraine can not give enough money for living yet and the heads of the companies still do not understand in full the opportunities and the revenue the online business can give to their companies. You will notice that 99% of portfolios from group one are created in English and that’s the only language on the website. Below I’m presenting the showcase of “Ukrainian style design” of both groups that I named accordingly.

What we create in Ukraine

Website: http://www.uadesign.com/

Website: http://www.bragindesign.com/

Website: http://www.softsoul.com.ua/

Website: http://www.invision.com.ua/

Website: http://www.mavik.com.ua/

Website: http://www.seotm.com/

Website: http://www.azureait.com.ua/

Website: http://www.aranea.com.ua/

Website: http://www.bizua.net/

Website: http://www.idea.net.ua/

Website: http://www.zeema.com/

Website: http://www.webcreation.com.ua/

Website: http://www.alyoshin.net/

Website: http://deluxe.dp.ua/

Designs we create for the world

Website: http://theoleg.com

Website: http://lanitta.com/

Website: http://3z.com.ua/

Website: http://internalcarotid.com/

Website: http://psyho.ua/

Website: http://www.kavoon.com/

Website: http://every1knows.com/

Website: http://www.timofey.net/

Website: http://www.maxshaman.com/#/projects/1/

Website: http://piezodesign.com/

Website: http://p-e.kiev.ua/

Website: http://www.polkdesign.net/

Website: http://73dpi.ru/

Website: http://pula.com.ua/

Website: http://neodesign.com.ua/

Website: http://whiteweb.com.ua/

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Fireworks is the best software around for editing vector and bitmap and vector graphic. It helps you to rapidly prototype websites and application interfaces. Compared to Photoshop, there aren’t any decent online alternatives for Fireworks. There are a lot of new features in fireworks like CSS export and style effects and you should must give it a try.

Here’s how I came up with this list:

• I’ve collected around 50 sites using the following criteria: all of them need to have practical and easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do something in Fireworks.
• Then I sorted them and took the 7 most useful ones. I figured it might be better to do this and focus on quality (small number of sites, useful), then quantity (big number of sites, average.)

1. SmartWebby

What does it offers: SmartWebby offers 38 unique Fireworks tutorials. The most useful tutorials they have are below, under “Graphic design: Tutorials on Vector Graphics”. Under each of the sites I present, I’ll give you 2 sample tutorials there with a screen shot of the end result. So here are some of the tutorials on SmartWebby:

• Cloud effect

• Sunflower atwork

2. SixThings RapidFire Tutorials

What does it offers: SixThings gives you 11 amazing tutorials plus some other tips on how to be more effective in Fireworks. They named their tutorials “Rapid Fire” and I have no idea why, but I’m sure it has to do with them helping you learn this application very rapidly. Here are 2 of their best tutorials:

• Extracting logos (Rapid Fire #8)

• Dot Matrix Effect (Rapid Fire #11)

3. Imajine

What does it offers: They have 13 tutorials, and the end results they’re able to produce are fantastic. I found Imajine featured on many tutorial directory sites like Pixel2Life, and now, for the first time, they are also featured on 1stwebdesigner! :) Some of their tutorial include:

- Old paper effect in Fireworks

- Beautiful rainbow pattern

4. Fireworks Zone

What does it offers: Well…they have 340 tutorials and resources on that blog. It’s the biggest resource I found on this topic (next to Adobe Fireworks Support Center.)  Here are some neat tutorials they have:

• Create a human iris

• Create Coca Cola Glass Text

5. Fireworks Support Center

What does it offers: You have over 100 tutorials there. Really neat. This is the official page by Adobe for supporting Fireworks, so it better be good. Most of the tutorials there are videos, so I’ve decided to provide you with some TV shows Adobe has on their site.

• Learn Fireworks CS4

• Fireworks Tips and Tricks

6. Blue2x Blog

What does it offers: They have 10+ Fireworks tutorials. I really liked the tutorials on creating logo and fancy buttons. Here are some examples:

• Simple Orbs Tutorial

• Create a fancy text effect in Adobe Fireworks

7. Enthesoweb

What does it offers: This is the first page you’ll get if you write “Fireworks tutorials” into Google. However, I haven’t found them to be that good in quality (their quantity is good, they have 20 tutorials on Fireworks there.) Some of them are:

• Create a twist and fade image

• Add textures to text

I’m not perfect so maybe I’ve missed some awesome Fireworks websites. That’s why you have the comment section :) Hope you enjoyed this article.

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