To Photoshop or Not To Photoshop…
I really like Jason Fried (of 37 signals) and pay attention when he has something to say. So that’s exactly what I did when I read this post yesterday about why they skip a Photoshop (or visual comp) step in their development process. He makes a number of salient points: Photoshop isn’t interactive, it’s not very collaborative, it doesn’t ever look the same as the finished product (esp. the text) and it’s awkward (for him at least).
While well reasoned, something about his post didn’t jive with my experience. When I take the time to build out a “roadmap” for a design in Photoshop (or whatever design tool makes me most comfortable), experience tells me that things end better. I get to make mistakes early. I also end up pushing things further (visually or even at the interaction level) because the tool gets me there quicker. I invent things that may look improbable (or even impossible) to actually pull off and then by the time I get to code, I actually pull them off!
I can respect both sides of this issue, but apparently I’m not the only one who disagreed and Jeff Croft’s thoughtful response was illuminating. Does a “photoshop” step help out with your workflow?
Louis Duran
12 jun 2008
I’m going through this right now. Designing a WPF based application for an Uber-control panel type application. The designers don’t know WPF at all and are doing all the visal design in Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects to demonstrate animations.
They have pushed the envelope for this type of application but I haven’t seen anything that I think will be impossible. Some things that will be challenging but not impossible with WPF. The main problem is that the designers are giving us all the assets as .PNG files which I plan on throwing a lot away and re-doing them in XAML.
By the way Robbie, I’ve been watching your videos on TOtalTraining.com. They are excellent! Good work.
Robby
13 jun 2008
Thanks Louis. I’m glad you like the TotalTraining videos!
I have some thoughts about the whole .png to xaml workflow that I’ll include in a future post. Glad to you know that your design team is pushing you though.
Aaron
13 jun 2008
I’d suggest it works well for 37Signals since they tend to keep their designs simple and “clean.” If they were to push the edge, I’d be very skeptical that they’d stick to an HTML editor for example. It’s often not a simple task to take a vision for a web page and translate it to a combo of CSS/Images/HTML for a web page. For text in Photoshop, I generally turn off text anti-aliasing so that it looks closer to what the browser renders (and worst case, it actually looks a bit worse than the browser — this way it won’t mislead me).
Maybe it’s me — but when I get out the development tools — I tend to get more nitpicky — when I use drawing tools — I spend more time on design and less on the “implementation”.
If I’m doing WPF stuff, I do try to use Expression Blend though to keep my designs active and real. But sometimes, it’s too much work as it means creating lots of sample data, etc.
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