Photoshop is a raster graphics editor. It is made by Adobe Inc for Windows and macOS. It helps users to create and enhance photos and images. Since its release in 1990, Photoshop has become the the industry standard for graphics designers, digital artists and web designers.
Although there are many tools available today for web designers, and many of them are faster to use, none of the tools today gives you the the flexibility and one-stop shop effect of Photoshop. So lets discuss few points on the role of Photoshop for web designers.
1. Logo Design.
Logo is a symbol, graphics mark or an emblem of an organization that identifies its products, services, brand or property. A logo of a company should have a visual appeal to it. People generally find it easy to remember a logo and can instantly recognize the brand it represents. It helps to form a picture in customer’s mind. Here are some example logos from brands that have many loyal customers.
Photoshop is very useful in creating beautiful looking logos. It helps web designers to experiment with color, shapes, typography. No other tool gives the flexibility and options as much as Photoshop does to create logos.
2. Banner Design Of A Website.
Website banners are the first visual element that an user notices once they enter a website. Learn Computer Academy has an attractive banner that clearly states what we do and an animating image showing our institute. A beautifully designed banner makes a website stand out and increases the user’s attention instantly. If your banner has no life or personality, chances are you are loosing your users. Average readers are like 12 year olds, they are more attracted to color, shapes and imagery that are easy to read than plain and dull lines of text.
Photoshop helps us to create visually attractive banners. You can edit images as you like, make color corrections, add or delete elements from the banner or cut the banner in different shapes and sizes. Since Photoshop is a raster graphics editor, you can use photos you clicked with your camera, and create a beautifully designed banner with it. Here is a PDF tutorial from California State University explaining how to create a beautiful web banner using Photoshop Elements.
We at Learn Computer Academy teach students to create beautiful banners for websites to our students.
3. Creating Pixel Perfect Web Designs.
While designing a website every elements have to be taken into consideration down to a pixel. Every pixel matters when you want something to look great. Alignment, spaces and lines are important in a design as an imbalanced line will instantly make a user loose their focus and become uninterested. Grid and guides helps to to maintain a balance in the design. Pixel perfect is a measure of perfection that clients look for. There are 4 main process of creating a pixel perfect design:
- Pixel Hunting
- Fitting
- Depth
- Pixel Art
Photoshop is the most useful tool when you are looking to create a pixel perfect design. Since it creates raster graphics, Photoshop will give you the exact sizes of pixels you are looking to achieve.
4. Creating Wireframe Or Prototype For A Website.
As this Wikipedia article says, a website wireframe is a visual guide or blueprint that shows the skeletal framework for a website. Wireframes are black and layouts that shows the sizes and placement of page elements. They are made before the creative design phase of a website to showcase architecture and features it will have. Wireframing a website, provides a clear communication to the client and other parties how various features and functions of a website will operate after it goes live.
Wireframes are generally blocks of shapes and text and you can easily design one using Photoshop. Once you have the requirements from client, you can start building the wireframe matching their requirements. You can also use a few icons, gradients and figures but they must be in grayscale. You can also make use of the pencil tool in Photoshop to design parts of the wireframe.
5. Font Choice And Typography
Websites are built with letters and symbols. You want your users to read the information you are providing in your website. So the way you present the information really matters. Fonts should provide easy readability and influence meaning to your content, so visual language plays an important part in your verbal language.
Different typefaces are used for different types of websites. A website selling kids items such as kidsuperstore won’t have the same look and feel as Flipkart, that sells all kinds of products. Similarly the font size of a heading will be much bigger than that of a paragraph.
Photoshop has a variety of typography features where you can play with your fonts as much as you like. It allows to to use fonts in our computer and also fonts downloaded from web. You can add colors, shadows, gradients to a font, make them bigger, bold, lighter, 3D. Your sentences can be aligned as you want and also design your letter spacings, line heights as you like. Granted all of these are possible via CSS, but before starting to code, you will like to experiment with your font to get an overall idea of how the final website will look like.
6. Layered PSDs For Front-End Developers
Front-End Developers are he ones who code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Although some front front-end devs can also perform the task of a full stack developer and code in PHP, MySQL and other back-end languages. But many front-end developer prefers to start coding from a layered PSD design. This gives them a perspective of exactly how the design will look after the website is done. They can also learn about the functionality of the website from its Wireframes. Developers will slice your design for images and take your design variables to build a pixel-perfect website. Although many developers claims that PSD to HTML have become dated after the rise of responsive designs, but the truth is it is still very much alive and most web designers prefers it for faster workflows.
7. Image Formats
Photoshop has number of useful image formats and allows us to save images best suitable for websites. We can save images as .PNG for transparent images and .JPG or .JPEGs for non-transparent images. We can take help of the useful ‘save for web’ feature to compress our image and reduce the sizes of our web pages.
So as you can see there are many advantages of using Photoshop for a website designer. Although there are alternatives to Photoshop such as Gimp, Affinity Designer, InDesign, Muse, none provide the power of Photoshop. It also has the all-in-one advantage to it. Photoshop is also an industry standard in web design. So if you are looking for a job in Web Design, knowledge of Photoshop will prove to be your biggest advantage.