Why is Photoshop so 2006?
When it comes to design Photoshop is pretty much an unwavering standard. Be it web design, photography, advertising or other design-related field, it is pretty safe to assume that the work has been created using Adobe’s most prominent app. Being such a versatile piece of software has obvious advantages but also comes with some serious drawbacks as well.
Let’s get this straight: Photoshop wasn’t meant for UI design. It started as a photo editing application, and despite all the updates and advancements still is one in its core. It might be the most widely used tool in user interface design, but it certainly isn’t a perfect one and this article is to point out why.
How do you start each project? Think about that. In my case, everything starts with the grid. And I mean THE grid. It not only serves as a bootstrap foundation but most importantly gives each design element the right shape and proportion. Right now I can’t imagine creating a good design without having a proper grid system. And how does Photoshop address that? Simply, it doesn’t. While it allows to manually create guides it doesn’t come with any tools for a complex grid creation. Thankfully there are excellent third party plugins such as GuideGuide which allow you to create all the types of grids. That said, the out of the box Photoshop grid experience is simply garbage.
Another thing I find quite annoying when it comes to UI design is Photoshop’s text style management. Or rather, the lack of it. Especially after using Adobe InDesign where you can easily assign various heading or paragraph styles to any text. In Photoshop, you can’t. The .psd text paragraphs have fixed font family, font size, weight etc and there’s no way to manage them automatically or update the style for all same-class elements. And that’s just wrong.
The next two things I’d like to highlight are related with each other. It is 2014 right now so you can find the responsive, dpi-dependent or retina-ready designs almost everywhere. While they might be built upon raster elements the most effective way of creating those is by using resolution independent vector objects. Sure, Photoshop allows the usage of vector shapes, but it’s pretty limited. Try making a fully vector ring shape with a transparent interior. It is an impossible task unless you use a raster mask or import such object from Adobe Illustrator which allows path operations. But let’s say you’ve successfully managed to prepare such shape for your design. The problem is you can’t just simply export it as an .svg or other vector file format. You have to copy it to Illustrator, manually adjust the canvas size and then hit save. And what about exporting different sizes of raster images? Same, it’s all the manual work again.
As you can see Photoshop has some significant flaws when it comes to interface design. They might not be the most groundbreaking features, but still make the UI design in PS a pretty inconvenient task. I believe it is a high time to try other solutions, especially when there’s more and more competition in this area. For starters you might want to check out Macaw, Sketch and Edge Reflow.
Of course different software doesn’t instantly mean all bells and whistles. You might have a huge psd file library which consists of beautiful mockups and other useful resources which might become obsolete without Photoshop. Still, I think it’s worth a try anyway.
