Catch News
Do you skip Photoshop when doing a website design?
37 Signals have sparked quite a bit of discussion with a post titled: Why we skip Photoshop, which has lead to a few posts from other famous people, such as John Hicks, Stopdesign, and Jeff Croft.
Here at Catch we certainly don’t skip Photoshop, and most of the reasons why are covered in Jeff Croft’s post – possibly the main one being that we provide polished visuals for clients that they approve before we build it as HTML/CSS.
The inevitable Fireworks vs Photoshop debate comes up of course, and while I believe that neither tool is perfect for webdesign, I am more comfortable with Photoshop’s shortcomings. If I could name one thing that gets my goat in Fireworks, it is that I can’t choose how many colours I can have in my 8bit PNG. Fix that (which hasn’t happened in the beta of Fireworks CS4 available on labs.adobe.com) and I might spend the time getting around the rest of the issues I have with it.
Another discussion that is related I think, and also comes from a 37 Signals post, is Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS. We have quite a mix of designers here, I am more a coder than a designer, Nick is probably the opposite (although I like to leave all form coding to him…), Allan is definitely a designer who knows a small amount of code (although I gather he can make Wordpress work just by plugging it in. He also does a mean cleaner and tea-lady impersonation), while Hamish seems to be an ex-designer and ex-coder these days – goes with running the business I suppose. While we have often joked about making Allan code one of his designs as punishment for doing something so crazy, that is all it is, a joke. Being able to stay top of your game with design, as well as code, is such a big ask these days. Unless you are some kind of superman, I think one would always suffer. However, the more knowledge a designer has about what is and isn’t possible with HTML/CSS the better.
Don’t get me wrong I personally love Basecamp—but I think one reader summed it up beautifully
“You skip Photoshop? Just checked out your sites … and it shows. [And not in a good way]”
Posted at 2:53 pm on June 7th, 2008.I think that photoshop is a must in web development or any image manipulation.
http://www.dimpmexico.com
Posted at 8:58 pm on June 13th, 2008.I have to agree. Designing straight into HTML/CSS, even after sketching inherently has you do things differently.
Posted at 11:01 pm on June 17th, 2008.I love designing in Photoshop… but I think Fireworks frees you up even more ;-) Aye Nick.