Web Design – Use of Photoshop in Web Design

Web design, Internet Marketing & SEO

2,242 Followers

Web Design – Use of Photoshop in Web Design

13 June 2009 No Comment

Photoshop in Web Design

A Web Design company may use Photoshop for many reasons. The use of graphic design tools such as Photoshop can reduce the time required to develop a website and also leads to better quality of design. Photoshop is one of the leading graphic design software available in the market and popular with Website design companies, freelance web designers and other graphic design professionals. Photoshop is a must have tool for a web design company as well as any other business that has regular communication and media requirements. One of the main advantages that make Photoshop different to other graphic design software is its simplicity. Graphic design packages such as Illustrator may claim to offer a wider range of features however can be complicated to use and require experience or training. Photoshop on the other hand offers only the core features that that users are most likely to use. It requires only basic knowledge of graphics and can be easily self taught. Due its simplicity, Photoshop can also be used by non technical users with little or no prior graphic design experience.

It is a perfect tool to assist with designing websites and essential for all web designers. A Web Design Company often uses tools to make the design process more efficient and quicker.

Create Images or Entire website template

Graphic design tools such as Photoshop are used for creating images or even entire website templates. It is quite common for web designers to create the entire mock up of a website in Photoshop and use tools such as Image Ready to slice up the images and generate the html code required for creating a website.

Save Time

In the early years of websites, a web design company or professional would normally code all pages of a website by hand which is a lengthy and tiresome process. Coding an entire webpage by hand was not only time consuming to build, but was equally tedious during changes or revisions. This had an impact on both, the time scale for building a website as well as on its quality.

Photoshop usually shipped together with Image Ready another graphic application that is fully integrated with Photoshop and extends its capability manifold. Image ready not only helps with slicing a design into smaller html elements but also allows creation of animated images.

Produce better results

A graphic design tool such as Photoshop allows a Web design company or developer to create website graphics more professionally and in less time. The time saved in building a website can be used to focus on other areas such as content, usability or search engine optimisation. A web designer does not need to spend so much time coding each web page by hand. While some web designers prefer to use Photoshop only for creating images and use another tool such as Dreamweaver for creating the html code, others may create the entire website template using tools such as Photoshop and Image ready.

Reduce Load Times

Load times are important for a website as it improves usability. Graphics and images used on a website are well known to increase its loading time if they are not optimised correctly. Photoshop offers an easy method for optimising images for websites. It offers a built in method ‘Save for Web’, which automatically optimises any image and adjusts properties accordingly in order to create sharp images with smaller file size.