Comments on: Photoshop like a Real Designer

By: Mickel

Mickel — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:18:47 +0000

Good points. I think a good understanding of how a web page is built up should be enough for someone working in Photoshop to mock up a fully “doable” website. You won’t necessarily need to have the skills to bend pixel-perfection in CSS, but a good understanding of browser sizes, user interaction and what is possible to achieve in a browser is crucial.

Thanks for the article, I really enjoyed reading it! Flattred and added your blog to my reader as well.

Keep it up :)

By: edmund kudzayi

edmund kudzayi — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:30:53 +0000

Someone who designs a visual presentation of a website is not a webdesigner, they are an artist. Look at the art students who works with Ferrari or Mercedes. They cannot lay claim to being car engineers. They are simply artists employed to conjure up aesthetically pleasing visuals. The engineers then engineer solutions to make the imagination of the artist a reality.

By: David Bushell

David Bushell — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:26:41 +0000

Hey guys thanks for all the comments. In response to the billboard analogy I can see your point, but I think it would be more accurate to say that, if you don’t know the size of a billboard and the way people interact with it, you’re not designing a billboard. You don’t necessarily have to be coding a website or putting up a billboard to be able to design one, but you do need to understand how it works. You just reminded me of http://uptherefilm.com Up There! great video :)

By: Ryan Martin

Ryan Martin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:00:56 +0000

“Simply put, if you can’t code and don’t understand HTML and CSS – you are not designing a website.”

Not true, but I agree – web designers need to be able to do both.

This is like saying if you don’t know how to put up a billboard, you are not designing a billboard.

You can still DESIGN the website, regardless if you know CSS/HTML or not.

Besides you can learn CSS in no time at all, so DO IT! :)

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:40:05 +0000

Great article. I wish more people understood this. Designers send me mock-ups all the time where they haven’t thought about what happens outside on the 1024×768 pixels they are designing for (not to mention that within the 1024×768 you have to account for browser elements). They have no concept of browser scaling. The problem is that they have the same frame of mind when designing for the web as they do when designing a print piece. If you think statically with a box (1024×768) when designing for the web, the results are never good.

By: Jimmy Tidey

Jimmy Tidey — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:21:12 +0000

I really notice pages that load quickly; it”s a massive improvement in user experience. One of the benefits of designing a page which can easily be implemented with straight-forward CSS is that they are likely to be much lighter weight.

Although your rounded corners and custom borders only add a few kBs all those extra calls to the server do slow things down – especially before caching has kicked in. Not to mention that massive background image which doesn’t tile in any direction…

By: Kris Noble

Kris Noble — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:42:39 +0000

Great post, particularly the final wrap-up. The debate over whether designers should learn to code will likely rage on for some time but a designer with no understanding of the web and how it works will find that their designs don’t meet their full potential when put into practise.

As a “full-stack” designer/developer, I do everything from the initial design sketches to the fiddly backend code. As far as the design stage goes, I have on occasion caught myself “self-limiting” a design because I’m not sure how I would implement it in production. It’s quite hard to push yourself past that, but I haven’t yet come up with a design that I couldn’t realise in HTML/CSS. It’s actually quite fun to come up with a “challenging” design and then see how many cups of tea it takes to work out how to represent it faithfully on the page.

By: David Bushell

David Bushell — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:03:44 +0000

Hi Laura, thanks for the comment and sorry about losing your paragraphs :) The problem is there’s no specific piece of software for website design. Adobe should branch off Photoshop and add features like you suggested. I would kill for easy state-management, and don’t get me started on text rendering!

By: Laura Kalbag

Laura Kalbag — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:54:37 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more!

If you have the HTML and CSS in mind when designing in Photoshop, you’re doing the right thing. If a designer can’t do this they’re not designing a website, they’re designing a *picture* of a website.

It’d be great if Photoshop could add some kind of simple support for multiple states (active, hover etc.) I know this is easy to emulate using layers, but a way of building it in would give us further ways to add some idea of interactivity. It’s the static nature of Photoshop that’s the issue.

Also, making the text look half way like it does in a browser! That Type tool kills me, it’s so awful.