Author: Michael
Date: August 23, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Nicole wrote a post the other day about our design process. As she mentioned, when we set up Communications Tool & Die we were trying to determine a design process that would work for our company. Although we had worked in large organizations and as freelancers, it wasn’t clear what the best process would be for a small custom web design and development shop. After reading 37Signals’ article Why We Skip Photoshop we agreed that it would be a duplication of effort to design a visual mockup and then have to take the time to duplicate that effort in web technologies. But after some experimentation we have found that there are some very good reasons for us not to skip Photoshop.

For freelancers it probably makes a lot of sense to do one version of a design in whatever technology that freelancer is proficient. But for a design firm, that doesn’t scale. The problem is that our graphic designers are not expert web designers and so they can’t easily create a mock up in web technology. It’s a duplication of effort to have a graphic designer try to communicate to a web developer what they would like to see. And having the web designer determine the layout ignores the key talent of the graphic artist.

For a complex site design, it may take some time to determine correct way to lay it out in HTML, CSS, Flash, etc. All of our resources are sitting idle while one person fiddles with technology. That is not an efficient use of our time. By contrast, if the graphic designer comes out with a proposal in an image format, it can be arbitrarily complex and the task of actually implementing it is left up to the web designers at some point in the future. It doesn’t make sense to develop a full website if we don’t even know if the client is going to approve the design.

The perception of a duplication of effort by having the design initially laid out in a graphics format and then recreated for the web is something we found to be false. Once we have a design, we can slice the image and transport those exact pixels directly into the production layout. No duplication of effort. Also, by having the “master plan” done ahead of time, we can distribute the load of implementation across various web designers since everyone is working to a “master plan” and there is no confusion or duplication of effort.

If a design needs to be changed after consultation with the customer, it’s easier to communicate that to the graphic designer and have them tweak it in the image editing program. Changing a web design in the middle of developing it may have complex dependencies that need to be debugged. Cascading Style Sheets cascade both ways!

Every company and freelancer finds their own work flow which fits them. Certainly we can’t compete with 37Signals’ success in the marketplace, so whatever methodology they choose to use certainly seems to work for them. But for us, we don’t want to skip Photoshop.

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Categories: web design