Foundation Flex for Designers

By Greg Goralski, LordAlex Leon

All Flex applications look the same—a blue-gray background and silver-skinned components—right? That doesn't have to be the case, though. This book shows you how to ensure that your Flex 2 and 3 projects stand out from the crowd and provide your users with an application that is both visually stunning and beautifully functional.

Flex Builder coupled with the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) is a powerful combination, providing all the tools you need to create compelling, vibrant interfaces. This book guides you through creating applications with Flex Builder, designing layouts in Fireworks, creating custom skins for your components in Photoshop and Illustrator, and using CSS to enhance the appearance of your rich Internet applications (RIAs).

You'll learn how to efficiently use and style states, enabling you to switch between "pages", thus adding real depth to your applications. You’ll also learn how to build web forms that are intuitive to use, helping your users provide the information you’re after.

Your Flex applications no longer have to be contained within a web browser window—Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) enables the creation of desktop applications. This book explores giving an AIR application a truly custom shape and style, leaving the rectangular form that defines most applications far, far behind.

Flex isn't just for programmers; it’s time for designers to take back RIAs and show what that "R" really stands for. The Internet is not just about collecting data—it’s about visual communication and giving people a rich user experience, and that’s what designers do best.

In this book, you'll learn how to:

• Create fluid layouts for Flex applications
• Use CSS to change the appearance of components
• Use Photoshop and Flash to create custom skins for Flex components
• Create a custom-shaped desktop application (AIR)
• Use Fireworks to simplify layout and the production process

This book is part of friends of ED's 'Foundation' series

The Foundation series is perfect for beginners to a technology, because it doesn't assume any previous knowledge. Each book in the series takes you step by step through your chosen technology, starting with the absolute fundamentals and working through all aspects of the technology, ultimately providing you with a firm grasp of the basics that will enable you to create your own applications or web sites. You will learn by following complete examples at every stage of your journey, often by extended case studies that you will build upon throughout the book. The Foundation series will give you the broad and solid base you need in order to progress to a higher level of expertise.