Ask a Web Designer: “What can’t you live without when designing a website?”
Continuing now in our monthly series of interviews with notable web designers, we ask the question “What’s the one thing you couldn’t live without when designing a website?”. Granted this is only the second installment in the series (see: Listening Habits of Highly Effective Web Designers) but we’ve just decided to make it a monthly feature! Just like that! It’s certainly no surprise that Photoshop featured heavily in this survey, but hopefully readers can draw some insight from the working methods and essential tools of the trade from our interviewees.
Enjoy!
Liz Andrade cmdshiftdesign
“All the usual, of course… Photoshop, my 960grid template, a client… but I’ll get a little more specific.This is something I thought everyone did until I recently saw a fellow designers PSD files.It’s a small thing that makes the process of web design way more productive for me, it’s Layer Groups (Folders) in Photoshop.
As I add more and more elements and embellishments, my layer palette can get really crazy, so I like to organize it my sections “Header”, “Nav”, “Sidebar”, etc. It keeps everything organized and easy to edit, I can put various pages layouts in that one file and reuse Folders that hold universal elements instead of having duplicate layers.”
Ashley Baxter I Am Ashley
“It has to be LittleSnapper. I need an app to file away my digital inspiration. Whenever a design isn’t quite coming together as I had hoped, or I’m maybe stuck on ideas for a particular aspect, I boot up LittleSnapper and look through my “inspiration” folder. Right now I’m really digging poster design in particular. LittleSnapper has become an app I use almost daily.”
Paul Boag Headscape
“The obvious answer would be Photoshop followed closely by Coda. However, those go without saying. I think I would have to say a debug tool like Firebug or the Web Inspector in Safari. I find it amazingly useful to be able to inspect elements, check performance and make CSS changes in the browser”
Chris Cashdollar Happy Cog
“The thing that has been most successful my (and my team’s) design process lately has been rapid iterating using those HUGE Post-it Self-Stick Wall Pads and a Sharpie. We all value sketching but sometimes that can be too precious and detailed. Using these large 20x23 paper canvases, we can rough out numerous and varied ideas, discuss them in a group setting, and refine before moving on to more polished parts of our process.”
Jacob Cass Just Creative
“I use Illustrator for wireframes and then move into Photoshop for the rest of the work, utilising the 960 Grid System as a guide for layout.’”
Chris Coyier CSS Tricks
“At the bare minimum to design a website, you need a program to connect to the server (FTP) and the ability to create and edit text files. So I guess from the most logical standpoint, if I only can pick one tool, that would be Coda, which does both well. I use it more than any other program on my computer, I’d guess.”
Richard Darell Ink Rebels
“I would say my brain. Without it there would be no design to refine at all. I am sure many would go with their favorite app to use but the bottom line is that the best tool is actually your brain.
However, without a pencil to draw what pops up inside my brain I would feel lost. So, I guess it’s a hand in hand collaboration between those two that makes for a nice and fresh design.”
Jacob Gube Six Revisions
“My graphics editor is the one thing I can’t live without when designing a website. That would be Photoshop.”
Jon Hicks Hicks Design
“I know a lot of designers will say pen and paper, and that is important, but I have to say Coda. I adore the single window approach, where I can do a multitude of tasks aside from text editing — FTP, SVN, looking up reference and terminal shenanigans. While those features are for implementation, I use the live previews to design ‘in the browser’. Using real content and HTML form widgets, rather than mocking them up in a graphics editor.”
Brian Hoff The Design Cubicle
“One thing I definitely could not live without when it comes web designing is a template from 960.gs. Even if a design breaks outside the grid, the template serves as an excellent base foundation to get started on an empty canvas. ”
Roger Johansson 456 Berea St.
“My Mac.”
Mike Lane M.Lane.net
“The books ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ and ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy’ by Steve Krug — Although the lessons learned within are ever-present, these books are essential reference tools for me in creating online experiences that are as user-friendly as possible. Although the content is relatively basic, people often ignore the basics and all designers can benefit from reminders of what makes a website or application usable for most people. These guides help tremendously in the areas of design, content and interaction strategy. I refer to the books often when undergoing new projects and highly recommend them to others.”
Brian McDaniel BKMacDaddy.com
“For me, the one thing I couldn’t live without would be Adobe Fireworks. I create all of my mockups and design brainstorms in Fireworks because it’s what I originally taught myself on. I learned Photoshop a bit later and Fireworks is in many ways better suited for web design, as that is what it was created for. I often say it’s a simpler version of Photoshop, which works for a simple guy like me. :)”
Lee Munroe LeeMunroe.com
“I’ll go for A3 sheet of paper for sketching and notes — this is where all my web designs start.”
Veerle Pieters Duoh
“That’s an easy one to answer: CSSEdit”
Jon Phillips Sprye Studios
“I don’t think I could chose just one thing. I’d say a pen and paper for writing down ideas, sketching and wireframing, and Adobe Fireworks for designing and laying out pages.”
Mike Rundle Flyosity
“The one thing I couldn’t live without would be my extensive macros in TextMate. I have dozens of macros to automatically write HTML, CSS and JS for me when pressing the tab key after a certain sequence of letters. For example, if I hit tab after typing Luc it will expand it to “Lucida Grande”, “Verdana”, sans-serif. I’ve got a bunch more for common HTML blocks like unordered lists, inserting dummy text with paragraph tags, etc. I’ve also re-mapped the 7 key to trigger the built-in auto-completion because it’s faster to type than moving my hand off the keyboard to hit the Escape key. If I want to type a real 7 then I mapped Control-7 to do it. It sounds absurd but it’s greatly enhanced my productivity!”
Andy Rutledge AndyRutledge.com
“Gotta have the site content. And this is not just the page content for certain pages, but rather the entire site’s contents. This is because designing the website is not simply a matter of creating a good canvas for the respective pages’ content, but is also a matter of making the fundamental choices of site organization, content organization and combinations, etc. Just because the client has made certain decisions about how the site content is organized and balkanized does not mean that these choices are appropriate. It’s the designer’s job to evaluate and adjust as required for the client’s best interest.”
Grace Smith PostScript 5
“It would have to be my Moleskine Notebook. I don’t go near Photoshop without first brainstorming and refining ideas with a pen and paper. I have to let my ideas spill out onto paper to get a real sense of the project I’m working on. At times these are nothing more than scribbled notes but they’re not meant to be works of art (I’m no Mike Rohde), just merely a way of capturing my thoughts and ideas, which i can later refine.
Before I realised my obsession with Moleskine i simply grabbed a piece of plain A4 paper and sketched. However i became tired of reaching for random bits of paper, and I’m now very much in favour of a paperless office. So i looked for a way to capture my creative process in a neat and unique way, and i found Moleskine. It’s now an integral part of my design process.”
Mike Smith Made By Guerilla
“Besides the obvious answer (Photoshop), I’d have to say that pencil and paper would be my #1 choice. I sketch out a lot of design ideas before they go onto the screen and it saves me a hell of a lot of time.”
Steven Snell Vandelay Design
“I’d say pencil and paper would probably be the hardest thing for me to do without. I typically work on designs in Photoshop before coding them, but I’m not very good at jumping right into Photoshop. I like to try out different layouts by sketching on paper, and that would be hard for me to change”
Jonathan Snook Snook.ca
“I don’t think I could do without the Internet. I used to rely quite a bit on local documentation because bandwidth was slow. Now, with speedy bandwidth, I rely heavily on the web being available for research and documentation. So much so that traveling usually means no work. Wifi on planes is my key to productivity—or the destruction of my last sanctuary, depending on how you look at it!”
Chris Spooner SpoonGraphics
“The one thing I couldn’t live without when designing websites is good old Firebug. This handy plugin for Firefox makes it a breeze to quickly edit and amend CSS in the browser, and saves stacks of time without having to continuously go through the ‘Switch Application > Edit > Save > Switch application’ cycle!”
