Comment by tomkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomkin | Hacker News Reader

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?

tl;dr Use Sketch if you're on a Mac

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).

I LOVE Sketch. It's so good. What's lacking are proper video tutorials for complex things and different subjects. I'd love to see an hour long video of someone vectoring something or designing a mobile app from start to finish.

Started using Sketch a few weeks back, never went back to Photoshop.

When I design, I usually just have livereload running with my website on my right monitor and code in my left. Ctrl+S = refreshes the site = very easy to develop with just html/css.

This is exactly what I have been wondering. Do people still use the old slicing method for their PSD documents? Whenever I code from a PSD design, it is used strictly as a reference. I attempt to reproduce it using all CSS, and then for the parts that I cannot reproduce in CSS, I will extract the images from the PSD usually by just copying the layer to a new document and saving it as a PNG. But having these PSDs is very important for me during the design process, during the coding process, and having them around to compare after you are done.

It's very easy to go off track and start designing on the fly if you don't have a solid, agreed upon, reference.

I like the way you put it. Especially the point of how this "panders to developers."

I know I would personally prefer to work where I have some sort of "from designer" reference point. Be it scribbles on paper or a PSD, don't know if I care.

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