Please stop designing in Photoshop. That encourages a pixel-perfect design thinking that is more suitable to print. The Web, if anything, is NOT print.
If your goal in coding a website is to slavishly recreate a design expressed as a bitmap, you are wasting effort on fine details and dictating to your audience how they will view the website. You also lose the advantages of working in your target environment’s native language, which translates into more work and lower profits.
When you design for the web you design for an unknown presentation environment. The two most painful examples are fixed text font and size, and designing for specific window sizes. Someone with poor vision and a netbook is going to have an entirely different viewport into your site than someone with 20/20 vision and a 24” LCD. The person with the 24” monitor might have one or many browser windows open at any time. All of these users need to be catered to.
If you design the site in the browser it is easier to let the browser do the presentation work for you. Let the text flow where it needs to, let columns and boxes shift around. Done right, everyone will get the best possible experience from your site.
Quick show of hands here, who shows page prototypes to the client in more than one format ? Everyone (I hope) tests against, and shows in, multiple browsers. Who routinely shows in 1024×600, 1024×768, 1920×1200 and 1280×1024 ? What’s it look like in Mobile Safari ? Everyone is at least designing and prototyping in sizes other than what you regularly browse in ?
Michael Llaneza
Please stop designing in Photoshop. That encourages a pixel-perfect design thinking that is more suitable to print. The Web, if anything, is NOT print.
If your goal in coding a website is to slavishly recreate a design expressed as a bitmap, you are wasting effort on fine details and dictating to your audience how they will view the website. You also lose the advantages of working in your target environment’s native language, which translates into more work and lower profits.
When you design for the web you design for an unknown presentation environment. The two most painful examples are fixed text font and size, and designing for specific window sizes. Someone with poor vision and a netbook is going to have an entirely different viewport into your site than someone with 20/20 vision and a 24” LCD. The person with the 24” monitor might have one or many browser windows open at any time. All of these users need to be catered to.
If you design the site in the browser it is easier to let the browser do the presentation work for you. Let the text flow where it needs to, let columns and boxes shift around. Done right, everyone will get the best possible experience from your site.
Quick show of hands here, who shows page prototypes to the client in more than one format ? Everyone (I hope) tests against, and shows in, multiple browsers. Who routinely shows in 1024×600, 1024×768, 1920×1200 and 1280×1024 ? What’s it look like in Mobile Safari ? Everyone is at least designing and prototyping in sizes other than what you regularly browse in ?
Good. Keep it up.