I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: Photoshop is not design.
Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#52I especially like the APM analogy. The best designers I know make using photoshop/illustrator look like playing a piano
I can confirm that, but in the same time they have a high efficiency when it comes to _not_ create huge quantities of visual waste per minute.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic:the Gathering and Poker have lots of randomness in them and yet they're both very successful competitive games.
Poker at the very least is played for EV and moves are made with the expectation of the randomness converging over many samples. This is partly why tournaments are considered luckfests by most money game players since you need to win so many coinflips to win.
Well nothing prevents the game designer from implementing similar mechanics (lots of smallish randomized events in each game which will lead to variance reduction)
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#54Can someone tell me why some of the players keycaps are missing in the APM video?
It's to facilitate a type of keyboard technique that would otherwise accidentally press the Windows key. There may be others, but the one keyboard layout/system I know of that uses it is TheCore: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=341... (mentioned under "Lesson 1: Positioning").
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#55I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot. "It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!" Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
I have Starcraft on my resumé. If I were a master in chess, I would list that, too. I spend my free time voluntarily putting myself in fast-paced, high-stress situations where I am forced to make critical strategic decisions as quickly as possible in order to succeed. If that's what I do for fun, imagine what I accomplish when I'm working.
I'm a gamer. I genuinely believe that there's a lot to be learned from games via playing, studying, or building them. I know what it's like to have non-gamers look down at your time gaming and view it as worse than unproductive. However, even when I worked in the game industry, if you tried to tell me that Starcraft mastery adequately demonstrates your performance under pressure in a professional context, I'd laugh in your face.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#56There's an unusually high number of commenters on that website who have never heard of let alone played Starcraft.
They're too busy studying and trying to do well in school ;)
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#57I hate to be that guy, but this is a real poor comparison. First, who uses guides anymore outside of print? 1140 Grid or 960 does the job perfectly fine and prepares your design for responsive. You can write an article about Starcraft if you love Starcraft, but juxtaposing against Photoshop workflow is disingenuous at best, misleading and confusing at the worst. Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks…
Until you need to use that PSD for production. There are a couple things in PS which make it terrible in day-to-day usage: - no way to quickly export a layer or group on it's own with a transparent background (FW: click object, cmd+c, cmd+n, cmd+v, export) - can't copy layers with transparency to other applications - no 8-bit PNG export - auto-select sucks - takes minutes to load a 100mb file in an up-to-date compute…
I'm using Photoshop CS6 and I haven't had any of the problems you describe. "Save for Web" supports 8-bit PNGs. Exporting layers with a sequence of 4 commands isn't a burden. My Mac Mini loads up 100MB+ files all the time with no problem. I enjoy working with each pixel so I can make it pixel-perfect.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#58I hate to be that guy, but this is a real poor comparison. First, who uses guides anymore outside of print? 1140 Grid or 960 does the job perfectly fine and prepares your design for responsive. You can write an article about Starcraft if you love Starcraft, but juxtaposing against Photoshop workflow is disingenuous at best, misleading and confusing at the worst. Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks…
> Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks off in every aspect: automation, formats, shortcuts, UI, precision, etc.
Automation? Not really. The scripting Apis for both are similar. Plus symbols and styles are way more useful for UI design than smart objects. Plus you can find and replace colours. Woot.
Formats? Who cares. Fireworks does the ones that matter for web/app design.
Shortcuts? Subjective. Can customise pretty much anything.
UI I might give you. Fireworks is a bit odd in some ways.
Precision - not a chance..fireworks lets you type in the exact size of stuff you want oh so easily..
You should try fireworks sometime, it's pretty awesome.
As a dev, I love receiving a design in fireworks. It's almost a joy to work with when extracting all the bits I need. Photoshop is a pita (though I have written a bunch of scripts I use there to make it slightly less painful).
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you need to use that PSD for production. There are a couple things in PS which make it terrible in day-to-day usage: - no way to quickly export a layer or group on it's own with a transparent background (FW: click object, cmd+c, cmd+n, cmd+v, export) - can't copy layers with transparency to other applications - no 8-bit PNG export - auto-select sucks - takes minutes to load a 100mb file in an up-to-date compute…
I'm using Photoshop CS6 and I haven't had any of the problems you describe. "Save for Web" supports 8-bit PNGs. Exporting layers with a sequence of 4 commands isn't a burden. My Mac Mini loads up 100MB+ files all the time with no problem. I enjoy working with each pixel so I can make it pixel-perfect.
Sorry, I meant 8-bit with alpha channels. The four commands are for Fireworks, I have no idea how to do the same in photoshop. PS is miles better for pixel-pushing, but that doesn't make of suitable for a web design workflow.