Myself and some good friends were stood in the reception area waiting to get into the New Adventures conference when we got chatting about designing and building a website and we got onto talking about “designing in the browser”. We’d already talked about it on twitter so we knew the camp was divided. Myself, I’m a big fan. I find it easier to build a HTML base and build on that as I go. Of course I still use Photoshop to do the actual design bits but essentially most stuff gets laid out in the browser as blocks and I build on that, I guess like layers adding in colours and backgrounds, buttons and so on. That’s not to say I don’t do full size PSD’s at times. It depends on the design I am after.
My friend Nick is a big fan of doing a PSD first, code up after. This is how we do it at my place of work, it’s how we did it at my old place of work. It’s how I used to do all my own freelance work too.
There is one important factor in both processes in both ways. You are still using Photoshop to do the majority of the design side of it.
So in reality, we’re using both the browser and Photoshop or indeed Fireworks or any other leading graphics program together to produce the work so as Nick rightly pointed out, the term “designing in the browser” is misleading which led me to think of “browser led design”
But lets face it, we can talk about the right terminology until the cows come home, when really, it’s probably best to just get the damn work done.
But for 30 minutes as I sat there watching my tweet getting retweeted, I felt like a visionary. One of the big boys.
But if the term ever takes off and becomes legend. You heard it here first.