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Design

Posted by Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
13,405 Points

Is photoshop slicing common practice?

I'm just working through the photoshop deep dive and have got to the part about slicing up a .psd file into images for the web. It seems like a waste of time to me. I don't have much experience in design, but it seems it would be easier to just skip the .psd file altogether. Is this common practice?

James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points
James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points

Do you mean skipping the photoshop process itself and designing straight in the browser?

Ben Brown
Ben Brown
Courses Plus Student 662 Points

Or what James said... If you mean in the browser then why even look at Photoshop?

James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points
James Nelson
James Nelson
23,956 Points

If you are designing for yourself and already know exactly what you want the website / app to look like, then by all means you can design in the browser. Photoshop is primarily used for showing a client 'work in progress' as it a lot easier to make changes during the mockup stage than what it is during development.

In saying that you should be using wire framing tools as well such as mockflow, Balsamiq Mockups as well, especially in bigger projects.

4 Answers

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

You can check out Nick Pettit's article on the Treehous blog on how PSD to HTML is dead.

Well if PSD to HTML is dead what should we be doing?

Check out Photoshop's [new] role in web design

Ben Brown
PLUS
Ben Brown
Courses Plus Student 662 Points
Ben Brown
Ben Brown
Courses Plus Student 662 Points

Hi Cheryl

When you say 'skip the psd file altogether' how do you mean?

Slicing is common practice in the industry, a massive timesaver as once you have created your slices you can optimise each slice and set the filename and type. The the obvious benefit to it is; these slices (and settings) are now saved within the PSD so when you come back to amend your design and export your slices it already knows what to do.

If you were to skip the slicing, it would mean you would have to create a separate PSD for each of your assets (images). Can't see why anyone in their right mind would do this, especially if you have 100 odd individual items within your PSD.

Bottom line; keeps it clean, contained and will speed up your workflow ten fold.

Hope this helps?

Ben

Lex Semenenko
Lex Semenenko
9,906 Points
Lex Semenenko
Lex Semenenko
9,906 Points

This is a huge time saver for me when taking images from a Photoshop file.

Enigma64 Photoshop http://getenigma64.com/

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
13,405 Points
Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
13,405 Points

To clarify, I did mean skipping the mockup in photoshop and just writing in html/css from the start. I suppose that would be fine for small jobs, but a big website with a lot of design elements (or a pedantic client) it might be worth going that extra step. (am I on the right track here?) I'm getting a better idea of why you would want to design in photoshop first (i.e. managing a large number of assets) - that makes sense. I'll also check out some of those wireframing tools as well as the links James suggested. Thanks for all the comments!