On Design View, Andy Rutledge has an article titled The Employable Web Designer. Most of it is pretty reasonable, but he says some things towards the bottom that irked me a bit.

It is this paragraph in particular that annoys me:

“As an aside, you may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers. Take a job with a company asking for a Photoshop expert and I promise you’ll never be allowed to engage in design.”

As someone who does know Photoshop pretty well, and is pretty sure that all the jobs he has done required Photoshop skills – and were advertised as such – and none of those companies have been “inept” or “sick”, this just grates on me. Perhaps I’m being a bit precious. Perhaps I don’t like being told that my skills are not required, or that I’m doing decorating, not designing.

I also don’t like this remark: “Anyone can learn to use Fireworks or Dreamweaver in an hour or less”. Maybe there’s learning to use, and then there’s being really good at using. I notice he didn’t mention Photoshop as something that “anyone can learn… in an hour or less”.

So, he got my back up, he baited me good and proper. The question is, was it intentional and planned, or is he just a blogger whom I disagree with on occasion?

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.

When did Adobe first introduce image slices, was it ImageStyler? Sheesh, that was released in 1998! That’s 10 years. ImageStyler then got merged into ImageReady I think, and was bundled with Photoshop – 2001 is the earliest I can find that.

Of the 3.5 web designers in this office, I am the only one who uses slices.

You people out there who still crop, how do you keep track of all your files? Do you create actions that: crop to selection, flatten image, save-as-jpg? Or do you do it manually?

Get with the times people! Slices are the way of the future – heck, they’re the way of the PAST!