Why They (And I) Skip Photoshop

June 23rd, 2008

I just found an article by the guys at 37signals: Why we skip Photoshop. I trashed Photoshop (and pixel-perfect mockups in general) five or six sites ago and haven’t looked back. In addition to their reasons, I’d add that I’m generally faster at creating interfaces in HTML/CSS than Photoshop anyways, so why even bother? Working in code from the beginning also forces me to get a first-hand feel at how difficult certain interface aspects are to implement—I used to come out of Photoshop with something that looked pretty simple only to find that it took all amounts of fugly wrapper divs and CSS hax to accomplish. I’d like to keep my code as slim, semantic, and generally “pure” as possible, thankyouverymuch.

For fairness’ sake, here’s a post by Jeff Croft of Blue Flavor: Why we don’t skip Photoshop. Personally, his reasons for using the ‘shop don’t ring true for me: I’m not sure I have a firmly established visual aesthetic, and while I do tend to err on the side of simplicity, I think my approach benefits the user in the end. But, as Jeff says, to each his own.

The deeper issue here was, I think, communicated nicely over at A List Apart: Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping. They attack it from the “mockup vs. prototype” angle, and point out many of the practical benefits (and faults) of rapid prototyping. It’s a good read for anybody looking to tweak their design process.