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PSD to HTML is Dead

blog.teamtreehouse.com

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Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#111

Post by ctrl »

+1 all these replies. As a designer first, I taught myself to code, Just as I taught myself how print medium works. These details are integral to the end product.

A web designer that doesn't understand code != a web designer.

I think Photoshop should be replaced with Illustrator. for the initial design phases. 1) You can do wireframes in Illustrator, then build directly on top of that for design. 2) Multiple artboards lets you layout multiple screen sizes/breakpoints. 3) Resizing elements and keeping crisp edges is much faster.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#112

Post by IgorPartola »

grey-area wrote: post #81
IgorPartola wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To pile onto wonderyak's point, I am a developer, not a designer. I wish I was also a designer, but due to where my talents and experience lies, I cannot do both well at this point. The problem is that I cannot tell what is and what is not important in a design that is handed to me. I have had conversations with designers where I inadvertently change a margin on a callout box by +/- 10% and the designer notices and e…

As a designer and a developer (I often do both), I think I see where you're coming from, however I feel this is more a sign of a breakdown in the relationship between the developer and designer than a shortcoming of the tools. Design isn't so scary - I think a lot more developers should try to pick up a little, just as designers should know at least a little about the final medium for their work, and in an ideal work…

So this works really well when you are working with the designer. When I can walk into your office and say "hey, can you pull up the dev site and take a look at page X? I think we need to figure out a better way to display this" I am very happy. Even mediocre designers can deal well with this modus operandi and produce much better than mediocre results.

Where we run into a problem is when a client hires a design firm, works with them for months on a new site or application look and feel, gets invested in it, pays the designer and maybe even starts development with a few days' overlap with the dev shop. Another example is when you deal with extremely low budget jobs (less than $1k), where you are simply trying to minimize hours spent on a project. I have done WordPress themes off good, clean PSD's only in less than 8 hours. I have also spent close to 80 hours on some where the PSD's were super detailed, but lacked any kind of direction. When the designer or the developer is not in-house, communication is key, but is often a place where costs are cut.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#113

Post by ilaksh »

I agree that PSD to HTML is generally now a bad idea that will make the task more difficult.

However, I believe that the idea of having an interactive design tool should not be abandoned so easily.

I believe that we should create interactive GUI design tools that support the back-end encoding.

I know that doesn't meld well with hand-coded and maintained approaches.

I believe that we can create design tools that output acceptable markup. But I don't think we have to.

I think that the business of writing code in order to layout a user interface is ludicrous. I do it, because thats the way most everyone does it these days. Most everyone also drives massive 5 passenger vehicles as the sole occupant that waste huge amounts of energy driving to and from work every day. Point being, just because that is the way people do things, doesn't mean it makes sense.

Programmers by definition write code. If you're not writing code, you're not a programmer. The problem is the definition of programming needs to be updated, since we now can create very sophisticated programming tools that have friendly user interfaces.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#114

Post by user24 »

atacrawl wrote: post #13
reuven wrote: post #9

It drives me totally batty to work on projects in which the designer assumes that their only responsibility is to provide a PSD file, which the developers will then turn into HTML and CSS. I want to work not just with designers, but with Web designers, who intimately understand the workings of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, and the implications for different browser sizes and versions. Web designers speak HTML/CSS nativ…

The analogy I use is a web designer who doesn't know HTML and CSS is like a fashion designer who can't sew.

One I saw a while ago was that a web designer who doesn't code is like a sculptor who doesn't know anatomy.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#115

Post by [deleted] »

eponeponepon wrote: post #76
wpietri wrote: post #26

And thank goodness. If anybody knows where the grave is, I'd like to go piss on it. As somebody who long ago did print design, I totally get why designers would want pixel-perfect control. It is awesome, but you get that in print because you are physically manufacturing an object and sending it to people. The web was device independent from the get-go. It wasn't your paper anymore; it was their screens. There were a…

Hear, hear. I'm ashamed to admit I built one or two websites this way - but then I got a job wrangling XML into EPUB, and oh my word am I sorry for my sins now. And this: >It wasn't your paper anymore; it was their screens. ...is something the publishing industry needs to, but seems to be pathologically unable to, appreciate.

[deleted]

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#116

Post by nickpettit »

wpietri wrote: post #26

And thank goodness. If anybody knows where the grave is, I'd like to go piss on it. As somebody who long ago did print design, I totally get why designers would want pixel-perfect control. It is awesome, but you get that in print because you are physically manufacturing an object and sending it to people. The web was device independent from the get-go. It wasn't your paper anymore; it was their screens. There were a…

Amen. This is a wonderfully eloquent summary.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#117

Post by proexploit »

debt wrote: post #27
thoughtpalette wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute Horizontal And Vertical Centering In CSS http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/08/09/absolute-horiz...

Truth. The div would need a variable height though which would change the design.

The page linked includes techniques for both variable height content (e.g. translate -50%) and fixed content.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#119

Post by Pxtl »

wpietri wrote: post #107
eponeponepon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear. I'm ashamed to admit I built one or two websites this way - but then I got a job wrangling XML into EPUB, and oh my word am I sorry for my sins now. And this: >It wasn't your paper anymore; it was their screens. ...is something the publishing industry needs to, but seems to be pathologically unable to, appreciate.

Don't feel bad; we all did. The flip side of my rant is that the early web was as ugly as sin. The desire to use it to make something beautiful was a good one, and we had to try a lot of approaches toward that. My problem wasn't that fixed-width, device-hostile designs were tried, it's that they became the dominant approach without anybody understanding what had been lost.

Ironically I think the worst culprit for the fixed-width revolution was early CSS. There was a lot more variable-width scaling pages back when everything was tables, but IE-compatible CSS made that nigh-impossible.

Re: PSD to HTML is Dead

#120

Post by tomkin »

I don't know what the author at Treehouse is doing, but I use the PSD as a visual representation of what I will end up creating as CSS/HTML/JS. Who was still seriously drawing grids and cutting out PNGs/JPGs?

The take away for many reading this article is going to be: Photoshop is not the way to design a website. The article does attempt to address this is not the case, near the bottom.

In the end, the author admits that you do need some design reference point (Photoshop, Illustrator, paper, etc). I do remember the days of cropping out many images, backgrounds, etc., but that was at least 6-7 years ago.

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