| This is a high-brow flame war. The last post bothered me, and this one bothers me all the same. Let's cut the shit for a minute and examine the lay of the land. "PSD to HTML is dead" panders well to developers. But it doesn't make it true. Let's dig a little deeper into why a developer may want to believe that the incredible toolset contained within Photoshop is completely useless and unnecessary: The inability to use Photoshop. No one is slicing and cropping a PSD into images anymore. If there are still some who believe that, you need to spend some time talking to designers and front-end web developers. There's really no excuse for this misinformation. I'm not arguing for Photoshop here. I'm arguing for a design reference point – something that has been created by a (web/UI) designer, for the purposes of reference. It can be a piece of paper, Photoshop, etc. Photoshop makes it easy to manipulate a design. That's it – the central reason for using Photoshop. Moving divs around, adjusting CSS or erasing pencil off a piece of paper is never going to be as efficient as clicking on a layer and moving, resizing it, etc. That's just the reality of why Photoshop is used. This "debate" is reckless abandonment of logic, or simply passive-aggressive anti-design irreverence. When a front-end/UI developer has a reference for their layouts, it allows them to skip over "where does this go?" and get to their actual job. Some developers are agile enough to extrapolate other form factors based on how the design is structured. Some developers need a desktop, mobile, and tablet design to reference. At the end of the day, no one is slicing images. I am just trying to understand what the actual argument is. I can only assume that most would agree that an architectural design is essential for constructing a building. Are we really arguing that we don't need a solid foundation to start building from? |
I agree with most of your points except this:
>>Moving divs around, adjusting CSS or erasing pencil off a piece of paper is never going to be as efficient as clicking on a layer and moving, resizing it, etc.
As a visual designer and front-end developer (that knows Photoshop very well), code is actually far more efficient for modern UI's. It's much better organized than the PS layer model, CSS gives you tremendous reach with your changes (especially with SASS/LESS), and Developer Tools (or Firebug) give you amazing reactivity.
However, that being said, the designer must have both design skills and coding skills, which aren't, and shouldn't both be a requirement for the position. The most creative and best graphic designers tend to not know code well enough to become more efficient with it than their traditional layout tools.
The best middle ground for "thinking for UI" and quality graphic design is Sketch. Sketch eliminates 80% of the stuff you never use in PS for web design and adds the features you didn't know you wanted. Its styling options reflect the styling options of CSS. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Honestly, unless you have some very complex personnel issues, every web designer should be using Sketch over Photoshop (and maybe use Photoshop for image manipulation).