Skip to content

Comment on 10 Tips For Creating Website Mockups In Photoshopparent

Comments

Photoshop completely obscures the base reality of the medium of hypertext -- the document -- and directs all the focus onto surface concerns. I find that if you start by building pages like it's 1994 (but with div+span & class+id), and thinking about how to logically structure your document, the CSS can slowly fall into place iteratively.

Photoshop has all sorts of clever tools for pixel-perfection, and it's very easy to go overboard. The biggest problem is the easy delusion that the mockup is the object being designed, and the subsequent divorce from reality.

That's why I believe that if you're going to do anything outside a text-editor/browser/inspector, it should be in an unreal medium: dry-erase, crayons, cut-out construction paper, post-its, watercolors, FINGERPAINTS!

If you are capable of mocking something up in HTML+CSS, you should be able to know what to avoid in photoshop.

Photoshop is just as capable of doing a fast, pixel-imperfect layout, filling the role of MSPaint, fingerpaints, or whatever. If the designers find themselves thinking of the Photoshop sketch as the final product, that strikes me as more the designers' problem than Photoshop's.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.