How to Effectively Use Photoshop in Your Web Design

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How to Effectively Use Photoshop in Your Web Design

Photoshop has long been the go-to application for those of web page designers. The problem is that while the program is the easiest and most efficient to navigate, the world wide web – and how it is used – has changed drastically over the past 10 years. This is especially true with the advent of gadgets and smartphones where the site visitors are viewing your content on a diverse range of screen sizes.

Photoshop

Since Photoshop works in fixed boundaries, and web designers are rapidly moving to more responsive design principles (designing a website to fit any size screen, rather than to work with a particular fixed device), there are some inherent problems. As a result, companies and designers need to consider the following when using Photoshop for web design: Experimentation vs. Implementation.

Use Photoshop for Experimentation, Move on for Implementation

The bottom line is Photoshop just doesn’t work well for the full implementation of modern website design. Adobe is scrambling to add applications that will fix this. In the meantime, most web design experts agree that Photoshop is a great tool for manipulating visuals. Code is not. For this reason, Photoshop still works well for setting up the creative elements of your website design, and pitching them to the client.

Once the basic ideas behind line, color, shape and text have been approved, your team can move forward with the coding that will make the design responsive.  In this way, says Dan Rose, Photoshop can be used like a high-fidelity sketchpad, “Whereas it used to be our literal canvas, Photoshop can now become our ‘palette’ as the browser becomes the canvas.” Instead of describing exactly what a website will look like, it’s used for quick graphic exploration.

Has using Photoshop for web design become a challenge for you? Contact Local Business Marketing Solutions.

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