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by posabsolute
4537 days ago
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Yadi yada is dead.. I also think web designer should have a basic understanding of css & html, but too many time I saw average web dev saying no to a designer because, well they did not care or did not know how to do it. If you start limiting yourself you limit what the designer can create. Another thing is now there are tools to make PSD to HTML much faster like CSSHAT that provide you with the exact CSS for each element of your design. Also, designing in photoshop make design iterations much faster. By the time you design directly into html&css a design I could have iterated 2 times & have a much better end product. I'm not saying Photoshop is the tool for web design, there is place to be taken there, but tools like photoshop & sketch makes design works go much faster. |
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Say you want to swap over the search box with the account functions (sign in, cart, etc.) in a header on an ecommerce site. Chances are that you need only change a couple of lines of css to effect this layout change. Minutes later you can then run through the customer journey with the client and get a few people to test it. You learn quickly if this is better for usability and if it does not work you simply roll back the css to what you had before.
Compare with the PSD approach. You can spend a minor age fiddling with the umpteen layers, then you can hide/show layer groups for the homepage/category page/product page/basket page/checkout and so on, saving out some flat jpg thing along the way. Then present it to the client and ask them to imagine if it is better. If they go ahead then you hand it over to some developer that will then have to make what was signed off pixel perfect.
However, along the way you discover that the account functions are in a dynamic list, e.g. the basket shows how many items are in it, as does the wishlist, and, on some pages, e.g. checkout, there may not be all the links shown. So it changes around. Consequently the area/box that has been designed fills up or gets empty, impacting the design in ways not understood doing it with Photoshop mockups.
Note this is a simple example with no fancy responsiveness involved, just plain regular desktop view.
Put simply, Photoshop is a useless tool for any meaningful design. It results in very poor workflow. All clients have already had websites, they all know that PSD mockups don't look like that once they are implemented, and, if they do, there is a whole lot of stuff that is not accounted for. It is much better to be honest with a client and involve them in an iterative design process.