Whether you’re designing animated gifs to use as a Web graphic or to bring into Flash, this tutorial walks you through the steps you need to create these gifs in Fireworks.

Presented in clear, easy-to-follow narration, this tutorial covers how to make animated GIFs, and how to use states to control them.

Before you begin, keep in mind that Fireworks is not dedicated animation software, but it works well if your animation needs are simple.

Here’s an overview of the steps we cover in the video:

1. Create a Fireworks doc remembering that the size of your canvas will be the size of your animation
2. Draw something to animate
3. Jazz up your image with fills, colors, borders, and text
4. Once you’ve created your animation object, convert it to a symbol
5. In the “Animate” dialog box, choose states (i.e. frames), the distance you want the object to move, the direction, scale, opacity and rotation for your gif
6. Click through the states to make any adjustments in direction, time between frames, etc.
7. Preview
8. Once you have the animation looking how you want, export it using the “Optimize” panel and select “animated gif”
9. Save the animation as an .swf file if your boas is to bring it into Flash

Here is an example of a GIF animated with Adobe Fireworks. It was created by Maureen Furniss.

Watch the video to see these steps in action.

To learn more about using Fireworks or other Adobe products, consider a Total Training Online Subscription. Membership gives you access to thousands of online software lesson on products from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and more. You can start for as little as $24.99/month with no commitment.