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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much experience with prototyping-with-PSD...how standardized is that process among designers? This is a neat tool but it seems like it might be very dependent on good practices by designers, and seeing how adherence to best practices -- in naming conventions, file types, layer arrangement, etc -- can be highly variable among coders, I can only imagine what it's like among pure visual designers.

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Almost every designer I know implements in photoshop.

For prototyping, its either gomockingbird, balsamiq or some quick HTML (plus the odd photoshoping) to simulate interaction.

As a designer, I've never "implemented" in Photoshop. Ever. Illustrator, yes (a long time ago), but there's nothin' like coding your own design.

In fact, I design entirely with HTML/CSS (using the Live CSS Editor feature of the Web Developer add-on for FireFox) and use Illustrator to mix and pick colors.

I remember years ago when I had the revelation I was wasting time designing so much of the site in photoshop and that I could design much more usable and "organic" sites in HTML. I became adamantly HTML/CSS-first, using photoshop only for graphics.

These days I tend to do more of a mix, I like the expressive freedom of photoshop and the rigid grid structures and typography of HTML.

But I almost always start in photoshop after mocking. Probably from habit.

@dmix: Totally feel you on "organic HTML". Yes, Photoshop is a fabulous tool for making graphics, and playing with ideas... but something about handwritten code feels really good.

I cannot tell you how much I wish all designers worked this way. I spend more time cutting PSDs than I do building the backend of the site (which is what I am actually hired to do).

Yep, every web development job I've ever had has required me to get Photoshop installed, usually sooner rather than later. Then the company moans and drags their feet about licensing costs etc. My current Mac has one old cracked version of Photoshop, one version with an expired trial, and the Gimp...

Still better than having to work with 3000x3000 PDF's exported from InDesign...

I always find this sentiment funny. As a programmer, and one with 15+ years of HTML/CSS experience, I find it much easier to layout a website design in Photoshop. That being said, I usually jump to markup about 2/3rds of the way through the design. Everyone has a different comfort level, I suppose.

I find myself jumping in and out of Photoshop all the time. Quite often I'll have a working design in HTML/CSS, then as the requirements change, take a screen grab of the page in the browser and start pushing things around or laying new elements on top.

I used to always start in Photoshop and when I had 2/3rds of the design start coding. But since I started using CSS3 attrs like 'box-shadow', 'border-radius', etc. I only open Photoshop for tweaking icons, patterns, gradients; but never to design the actual page.

Exactly. Not taking advantage of what you can do - and how easy you can do it - in the code right away just means more time wasted. Once you get the basic layout out, all Photoshop is good for is finding the colors you're going to use (which a lot of times, tools like Colllor in addition to preprocessors with color functions can supplement) and quickly prototyping something just to see it (which is easier in Illustrator, anyhow).

With things like this and CSSHat, I fear that people will use these tools not to learn from, but to immediately sell themselves as devs and further worsen the state of an industry that's already lost its passion for the combination of art and experience by cutting all corners possible.

Wow, thank you SO MUCH for mentioning Colllor. Can't wait to use it in my next project :-)

Right? I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out who was behind it so I could send them some money, but couldn't. They finally added a form so I hit them up to put a donate button on there. If it interests you at all, I try to put all of the color and general prototyping tools I find on my snip.it -- http://snip.it/collections/1064-design--development-web

I use photoshop to sketch ideas or for some more complicated parts of a design. But in layout and styling terms I work directly in HTML/CSS.

I actually started doing it this was because products like TypeKit don't supply the fonts to use in anything other than the the web browser.

I don't think it's the case any longer that to be a designer you have to be tied to a particular piece of software to produce your work.

You can also give moqups.com a try. I started using them a while ago and am really loving it.

Disclosure: I am not owner of moqups. Just an enthusiastic early adopter/evangelist ;)

Depends on how you work… Photoshop use is not really standardised, it’s just that you are expected to put individual elements in individual layers.

Large web consulting forms expect the visual designer to work this way, to drop a PSD that they can then convert to a template for their CMS… But working in this way you’re relegated to a role of providing a visual look, not really designing the interaction of the site…

Also on a technoligical level it becomes harder tot exploit the possibilities of javascript etc. if you think in a static fashion. if you want more influence you either need to work in a more ping-pong fashion with a developer, or develop yourself.

In both cases I find myself rarely using Photoshop, preferring an iterative process, with sketches on paper and in HTML.

You are right. Lot of designs we have seen doesn't have good naming conventions. We are trying hard not to enforce it as it requires to change their work-flow. While generating pages, we do not consider layer set organization/naming.

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