Software used for web layouts?

Just read an interesting letter in this months edition of .net magazine, very relevant to the way this discussion has gone...

Having read your review of Fireworks CS4 and the response to your last reader's letter in issue 180, I feel the need to try and point out how wrong your coverage has been.

Now don't get me wrong, Photoshop is amazing and is nigh on perfect for manipulating images. However, it's merely OK when it comes to web design, Fireworks on the other hand, is perfect.
I've been using Fireworks and Photoshop for about 10 years. I've convinced every one of my workplaces how much easier it makes it to put your site together and get working prototypes designed in a fraction of the time. One company took less than 30 minutes ti make its mind up to get copies of Fireworks for every designer, as I could use symbols and colour search/replace to do in 10 minutes what was taking over an hour in Photoshop,

If you're putting together a site, there seems to be a host of features Photoshop doesn't provide. In Fireworks you can create dynamic buttons (and see how they'll roll and move live on the page), search and replace colours, resize objects with nine-slice scaling and easily name slices. In fact, almost any tedious web design task is made easy.

What Fireworks is no good at is image manipulation. It has the basics and can be used for quick fixes, but get your photographic images corrected in Photoshop. Use them as symbols in Fireworks and you can even quickly get your amended Photoshop images into your project in a couple of clicks.

Some people seem to think Fireworks was for an age where websites were built with sliced tables, but it has so much more to offer, CS4 also looks like it might finally have a decent looking interface.
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I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver at the moment, although when I finally get a mac, I'll use Coda instead. I know their very different programs (Coda not having the WYSIWYG) but I've seen enough of it to show me DW is way to much for my needs.
 
I've been using Fireworks for 7 years ever since I started web designing and its SOOO EASY to use and makes designing sites a lot easier. I do ocassionally use Photoshop for image manipulation or more full-on illustrations etc but get very frustrated with it as basic things like shapes seem a pain and it's harder to edit text layers quickly too, whereas Fireworks is easy peasy. Generally for layouts I think it's a lot easier all round. There are quite a few basic effects too which means you can do quite a lot of illustrative elements within it and add gradients etc (although gradients really slow it down!). I haven't got Adobe's new versions of Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash as still on Macromedia's older versions BUT either way they were all designed especially for the web and Photoshop wasn't! It has got to come down to personal preference or rather what you are used to though and I just haven't had time to try any other programmes. As long as a program does the kinds of things you want that's all that matters - i.e., the result, and Fireworks has been more than adequate for me personally!!!
 
I use Photoshop, I am not a fan of fireworks, I don't know I have just always used Photoshop, then I use the crop tool, as I don't like the slice tool one bit, thencode away in notepad++
 
craigfarrall said:
I use Photoshop, I am not a fan of fireworks, I don't know I have just always used Photoshop, then I use the crop tool, as I don't like the slice tool one bit,
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I do the very same thing, never liked the slice tools so always cropped images as I've needed them and then do a quick Ctrl+Alt+Z to go back to before the crop and get the next image I need, good to hear it's not just me that works in this way! :)
 
Thats exactly my trick use the good old Ctrl+Alt+Z button, works a treat, why do Photoshop even have the slice function? it is totally useless!
 
For personal projects I've been taking the mark-up and CSS first approach to quickly build the layout and get my content structure. When I need to make any graphics up I'll load Photoshop, though I would like to try out Fireworks again.

At work the designers use Illustrator, but my extent of using that is just to note sizes, fonts, colours, etc for front-end development.
 
I use Photoshop, and I'm one of those that couldn't imagine using Ilustrator. I wouldn't touch InDesign for web if it was the last life-vest left on the sinking USS WebShip...talk about making life harder on yourself. To be fair, I suppose it depends on what kind of site you're trying to build.

I also never use the slice.
 
I also go straight to the code. I mark-up my layout and have the structure sound before I move on to any images. Then I go to photoshop to find my color palette and make any images I need to.

I don't "slice" images. I think the last time I used image slices was in 2000! And I definitely used fireworks and would continue to use fireworks if I were asked to slice up graphics today. Why? Because photoshop is not made for web graphics. It has been modified to handle them better, but that is not what it was made to do. Fireworks, however, is created specifically for web design.
 
Greg said:
I do the very same thing, never liked the slice tools so always cropped images as I've needed them and then do a quick Ctrl+Alt+Z to go back to before the crop and get the next image I need, good to hear it's not just me that works in this way! :)
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I used to do it this way as well. But now I use the marquee tool and the drag the guides to snap so I still have that selection for later. Then I hit ctrl+shift+c, ctrl+n, and then ctrl+v. Just in case I have no backup .PSD and I've saved by mistake after cropping and then my PC crashes. Anybody else who use this technique to cut graphics?

I've never tried Fireworks. But I've used Photoshop for 10 years now, so I'm just really comfortable with it. And for coding purposes I find Notepad++ brilliant.
 
Aarlev said:
I used to do it this way as well. But now I use the marquee tool and the drag the guides to snap so I still have that selection for later. Then I hit ctrl+shift+c, ctrl+n, and then ctrl+v. Just in case I have no backup .PSD and I've saved by mistake after cropping and then my PC crashes. Anybody else who use this technique to cut graphics?
Click to expand...

Hey Aarlev,
I always found that even with snap to guides on the crop area never quite gets onto the exact guides, they always seem to be one or two pixels off? I can always add to or subtract from the selected area, do you have to do the same to get the exact positions? (I'm running CS2) Greg
 
I've always used Photoshop, I've never really had that much background knowledge of photoshop, but then I got into it and quickly learnt the funtions, extremley user friendly in my opinion.

I've tried to use Illy, but it was so hard to do anything I had no idea what I was doing. I've also worked with Fireworks which gives in my opinion no other options to explore.

Photoshop CS3 (slice) - Dreamweaver - Web!

=D
 
Ive always used Photoshop and like many others would normally look to no other program - in Photoshop, I just design what I want, slice it up and then code it all using html and css.

Ive never even thought of using Illustrator to design whole website layouts but I can see some of its benefits.

I use Photoshop becuase not only is it user friendly but the vast amount of layer effects, filters etc prove beneficial in creating a very visual design different to anything else.

With Illustrator though I could see it being good to create a website which does not much of a visual aspect becuase of its ease of controls for graphical drawing.

Phil Johns
 
Hi chaps ... just a though, whilst I prepare a rough layout for client approval in Photoshop I tend to do a lot of work 'on-the-fly' in a great programme for Mac people called Freeway, (be assured I have no affiliation with this company) - it's a really clever piece of software with a great community. Best Roger
 
Greg said:
Hey Aarlev,
I always found that even with snap to guides on the crop area never quite gets onto the exact guides, they always seem to be one or two pixels off? I can always add to or subtract from the selected area, do you have to do the same to get the exact positions? (I'm running CS2) Greg
Click to expand...

Yeah if you have a guide in place and use the marquee it's usually always off but if you make a selection with the marquee and then drag the guide to snap to the selection it's always precise for some reason.

Then if I use the marquee tool again on those guides, I just use ALT or CTRL to subtract or add to the selection if it's a pixel or 2 off.

Works for me, but maybe I'm just weird..hehe
 
I use Photoshop - it's simply what I've always used and come to know.

I personally dislike it when I'm supplied with an illustrator file to build a site because, more often than not, it's not to scale so I have a rotten time trying to sort out dimensions of the site and re-scaling assets. Granted, this is error on part of the supplier, though.

However, I'd still argue that illustrator is better for working with vector images and for print design, since scaling is important, and Photoshop better for rasterised. And, as images must be rasterised for web, it kinda makes sense to use the latter.

That said, though (!), we probably shouldn't be using either because even Photoshop was not originally intended for web layouts and is comparable to using driving to the supermarket in a ferrari - overkill!

I've yet to try the new Fireworks but I've heard is far more web focussed than ever - looking forward to trying it out.

Would be nice to have a design program dedicated to web-interface design.
 
I use Photoshop myself, but I believe that Fireworks produces smaller file sizes, and asfaik doesn't mismatch png colours. I could be wrong about that last one though...
 
I'm a photoshop person also, was the first design program I used and i've stuck with it ever since - I'd like to play with other programs, but I always seem to be up agains't the clock - so naturally turn to what I know...
 
I use EVERYTHING I can get my hands on! Predominantly Fireworks though, as coming from a technical illustration background I tend to rely on vectors quite heavily, also being of the old school of Macromedia it completed the package and was the missing link between Freehand and Dreamweaver!

I create vectors, logos etc in Illustrator, and photo editing and image effects, even blends, fades and masks in Photoshop (although latest versions of FW the bitmap editing is much better). Since Adobe bought Macromedia and bundled Fireworks and Dreamweaver into their suite transition is much better, but even in the old days you could import a fully layered PSD into Fireworks, and this is something I regularly do. I layout in Fireworks, I’m just comfortable in the vector based environment and pixel accuracy is important. Fireworks exports seem to optimize better than Photoshop, creating smaller assets, something which designers seem to have forgotten in the modern day of broadband…

I remember the unwritten rule that an entire webpage shouldn’t be much larger than 100k (all images included!). However sticking to some of those old school rules can help with super speedy load times across 8meg lines, I used to push the limits with magazine style BIG photos for the homepages on the music site I used to work on, yet do some serious photo cleanup to keep the size down…

Although I’ve never let FW make my websites by slicing up and exporting as HTML, even when tables were king, you get loads of waste code and Macromedia behaviors (still used used by Adobe) for roll over’s or dropdowns are even worse – they never intended you to decipher that JavaScript did they? I slice manually then in Dreamweaver (code view) I manually build up my page. I’m getting into .Net now, working with developers that make clever stuff happen, I still create the HTML in Dreamweaver then copy it across to .Net but I guess one day skip out the DW stage and code straight into .Net.
 
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