Photoshop Etiquette: Basic Knowhow for Designing The Web Using Photoshop

Adobe's Photoshop still is the market's most common and most popular choice for professional designers. Besides photography and print design, which Photoshop once got invented for, it is widely used in the designing of websites, too. The last ten years saw the product grow in functionality especially in terms of web design features. A large part of the world's most successful websites started as a draft in Adobe's market leader. Photoshop Etiquette is a new and free service, aiming at beginners in web design with Photoshop. It offers the absolute basics and makes for a very good starting point. Photoshop Etiquette

Photoshop Etiquette: Eight Chapters To School You

As Photoshop Etiquette delivers the most basic information and support, its audience recruits itself from beginners and not that advanced users. Eight Chapters cover the handling of files, layers, images, typography, effects and practices as well as techniques for quality control and exporting the results. Besides the more technical aspects, the site details how you should organize and administer a web project from within Photoshop. This includes appropriate naming conventions, grouping of files and elements, anything needed to keep your stuff together and still be able to understand one year in advance what you did today and why you did it. From my own experience, this really is an essential part in the process of building up a website, that should not be missed upon. Photoshop Etiquette: Working with Images Apart from that, Photoshop Etiquette has practical tips on design in general. You'll probably know that skewing or otherwise deforming texts and images is not a thing to do, but did you know, that you should refrain from scaling text using free transform, instead sticking to whole pixel values? Or did you know, that in the early project stages, where you are still drafting out what might or might not become the client's new web-home, you should refrain from using destructive effects and filters, thus preferably using smart objects instead?

Legal Aspects and a bit of Quality Assurance

To round things up Photoshop Etiquette has some info on how to legally correctly use images and fonts. The chapter on quality assurance has tips on how to make sure, that your layouts stay free of mistakes in orthography, coloring and the placement of layers. Mistakes that could embarrass you, if found a little too late... Conclusion: Photoshop Etiquette is an easy read as it is a rather short offering. But this is exactly what makes it interesting. Despite its lack of depth in most areas, it transports the basics in a way that you will easily remember then when needed. It's safe to say that Photoshop Etiquette is a mandatory bookmark for every beginner in Photoshop web design out there. As the service is completely free of charge, you have nothing to lose but a few hours of your time. Don't be too happy to find out that Photoshop Etiquette seemingly comes in a variety of languages. These are only automatic translations with a corresponding quality... (dpe)