I disagree. In the hands of a competent web designer, photoshop is still the most expressive tool available. I've been bouncing PSDs with a designer for the past couple of weeks and I want him being creative and making something beautiful, not constantly worrying about how the images are going to get sliced up or sprited or what's svg and what's not. That's my job. So long as there is in iterative process in place where I can keep him within the bounds of reality, it all works out very well in the end.
PSD to HTML is Dead
91–100 of 171 posts
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#92But picture is a good start to show what kind design you want And yes in many accessions some designers are tooooooo pitchy about their psd.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#93I swear I feel like I've read a version this article once a year since the advent of CSS. This is a naively utopian vision of the future. The designer/developer is a very rare breed outside of the HN community. Most designers can't / won't write markup or CSS, and most developers are piss poor designers. The design->planning->building segmented workflow will always exist, as it has in all engineering disciplines sinc…
As much as the idealist in me would love to disagree, this is the fundamental problem.
As stated elsewhere in this thread, agency clients are used to a diet of static Photoshop mockups, and I can't see that expectation changing anytime soon.
What might change are the tools - it's in designers' interests to save time, and tools that allow designers to create mockups for different screen sizes whilst still maintaining the flexibility of Photoshop are beginning to emerge. But it'll take a few years, at least, for those tools to reach maturity and enjoy widespread usage.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, since there is an implicit agreement beforehand that the PSD should be converted to HTML/CSS. For example, if I missed a border on an element or margin spacing between text areas this would be something I would be expected to fix. The designer would most likely point this out. Many designers I've worked with get very upset if you change anything in this regard without some sort of discussion. The point you bring…
Yes, since there is an implicit agreement beforehand that the PSD should be converted to HTML/CSS. I see why it'd be a pain for you, but feel like this process of handing over a supposedly pixel-perfect design is inherently broken - without collaboration the design will be dead as handed over - it should be changing constantly as you encounter difficulties, first in translation to templates, then in putting in conten…
Oh, the process (as normally done for the past decade) is completely broken. Thats one of the reasons that the groupthink behind "PSD to HTML is Dead" is important in spite of how hyperbolic the statement is.
There is always an adjustment period throughout development, however just a simple understanding of the medium would eliminate all but the toughest of these problems.
For as long as I've done this I have mostly worked with designers that started in print, have zero to very little experience in working with the web and do not care to learn.
It is not just the designers who hold blame here though as the instituions which employ them do not require anything more than they've done their whole careers.
Combine that with the fact that a lot of these designers are expected to design for both print and screen, it creates a situation where you cannot expect someone to know all of the nuances of both mediums. When this happens, things like declared text sizing is important in the PSD because thats how they set up their print files too. Everything is implicit.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The important part for elorant (and me) is that CSS is awful to work with. And everyone in this thread is proving it by pointing out that you should use some kind of translation layer instead of actually touching it.
Well, there's two things at play here. The complexity of the CSS model in the browser (plus all the browser-specific quirks) and the CSS syntax. Less only solves the CSS syntax issue. My reading of this thread is that it was started based on the complexity of dealing with CSS in the browser rather than dealing with the CSS syntax.
CSS also has serious issues with its design (not just syntax) - it's a pretty awful markup language, because it was created apparently without reference to hundreds of years of graphic design and text layout and missed out some essential typographic and design concepts.
To pick a few examples, until recently you couldn't have grids, multiple columns of text (still pretty broken), embedded fonts, and the box model is unnecessarily complex, which led to loads of bugs in the browsers. That's easy to say in retrospect of course, and lots of the problems are now being fixed or worked around, but it's a pretty gnarly language, and many criticisms of it are not based only on ignorance but on substantial flaws in the original design. CSS is awful to work with, and is only slowly getting better.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#96It 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…
As someone who's done a huge amount of front-end development, I disagree completely, at least when we're talking about graphic design (as opposed to interface design, and even then it depends).
The job of a good designer is to come up with a "look" for a page that feels a certain way, that communicates certain ideas, with careful consideration of clarity and emphasis. Their skillset is emotion and communication. Knowing the technology beneath it helps them exactly zero in this, except in just a few instances of knowing what is and is not technically possible in the browser.
In fact, I have found it more difficult to work with designers who have learned some HTML/CSS, because it's a case of 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing' -- writing HTML/CSS for a blog is a totally different thing from creating a clean, extensible front-end architecture for a large site, and you're constantly having to explain to them that, yes, you can do that on your blog, but it's not that simple to implement on our site, because this component is used in multiple ways in different places, and no you may NOT edit our source code directly, because changing the on that page will change it on the whole site, which is not what you're intending. Or it breaks the object-oriented CSS model we're using.
The only thing I ask from designers who provide PSD files, is that they remember to draw hover states as well, and explicitly indicate what happens to text that will inevitably outgrow the area they've given it -- should there be ellipses, should it expand downwards, should there be a character limit, or what. And to stick around afterwards so I can ask them about if inconsistencies in their design, like close-but-not-exact font sizes or spacings, are actually intended. Really, that's about it.
And the analogy of a designer who uses Photoshop but doesn't know HTML/CSS is like a photographer who doesn't use a camera is just plain silly. Photoshop is their "camera". The end result is just pixels in a browser anyways, it's not like they're giving us webpages on oil canvases. And guess what -- print designers don't know how to run printing-press machinery either. Because Photoshop/Illustrator/etc. are their "cameras" as well.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#97Earlier 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…
I agree with everything you're stating here, I just wish it was that easy in practice.
Some of the problems with deliverables is managing client expectations, they expect or have gotten used to seeing output of a PSD that counts as 'what their site will look like'. The creation of a PSD as a deliverable for the 'final design' is boilerplate for every agency I've ever worked with.
Responsive design has finally started nailing the coffin though; it becomes too cumbersome for designers to create renderings of different viewports, let alone understand the intricacies of how media queries work or how assets are delivered to different devices.
There has been a lot of creative thinking about deliverables (Style Tiles, Atomic Design) which is helping us get over the hump.
I would hazard a guess that most of the sites in the SMB space are either WordPress templates or custom designs that were then handed off to a service or an outside developer to make into functional websites. Sometimes, the developer doesn't get to see anything until the client has signed off on the design. I see this happening with large companies which do multiple millions of dollars a year in agency work.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point. Does anybody know the historical origin of the notion that there are "designers" who can be ignorant about their medium? When I talk to, say, friends who paint, it's a very specific activity for them. They know a lot about actual paints, because they do the painting. Pre-web, I knew people who were print designers, or packaging designers, or logo designers. They too knew the details of their medium intim…
Design as an profession is older than the web - it's older than programming. The industry as a whole is intimidated by modern technology, and appeals to non-technical people. As a result, many of the people coming out of professional design schools, trained in the esthetics of flat, non-interactive design see themselves as 'above' all that 'computer stuff'. This, combined with intimidation, and a massive demand for g…
My hazy recollection was that at some point people doing flat, non-interactive design called themselves "print designers" or some variant. E.g., magazine designers, book designers. I'm wondering when they dropped the medium-specific notion of design. Are you saying that goes back before the 1950s?
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#99with tools like edge reflow, the human part of PSD to html is going to be dead. HTML/CSS/JS will become the assembly of the web that no one is directly programming with. Designers will keep working on psd and use edge-like tools to export html/js files, and coders will be using clojurescript/fay/coffeescript etc.
Re: PSD to HTML is Dead
#100"X is dead" is dead. Just because you don't use X doesn't mean others don't use it.
A very large number of people who do web design for a living are much better at making their visions a reality using PhotoShop than HTML/CSS.