Erik Akers

I find there is a large mis­con­cep­tion for what Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor is used for. But here is the thing there really isn’t a wrong way to do any­thing, well maybe there is more on that in a moment, but I feel Pho­to­shop is one of the most mis­used pro­grams in all of design and Illus­tra­tor is one of the most under­used pro­grams. I think the mis­con­cep­tion comes down to two things, image cre­ation and image manipulation.

Image Cre­ation

Every­one knows there are many dif­fer­ent ways to cre­ate new graph­ics, and none of those ways are nec­es­sar­ily wrong. How­ever I think more peo­ple use Pho­to­shop to cre­ate graph­ics than any other pro­gram, which is not bad thing I just don’t think it’s cor­rect way to go about it. For any new image cre­ation I use Illustrator.

For me Illus­tra­tor much more flex­i­ble scene that it’s a vector-based soft­ware which allows me to scale any ele­ment that I designed to any size I needed  before any­thing is final­ized. That doesn’t mean that Pho­to­shop is com­pletely cut out of my work­flow it’s just I use it to manip­u­late and “pol­ish up” graph­ics after they’ve been cre­ated and Illustrator.

Image Manip­u­la­tion

This is where I think Photoshop’s true beauty is that, not in the cre­ation of new graph­ics but in a manip­u­la­tion of  of graph­ics. Photoshop’s great­est strength is to take a photo and make it look the best it can hence the name Photo Shop, how­ever think peo­ple get stuck in the idea that Pho­to­shop is a do it all pro­gram. Which in my view it’s a great pro­gram, but not one that can do it all. Take for exam­ple logos I would never cre­ate a logo in Pho­to­shop  because that’s a dis­ser­vice to the client that  hired me to cre­ate a logo for  since they need to be able to use that logo across all medi­ums. Why? That comes down to under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ence between a raster graph­ics and vec­tor graphics.

Pho­to­shop and My Workflow

For me Pho­to­shop is the final  stop for any graphic that I’ve cre­ated, minus logos. Take for exam­ple, I am design­ing a new web­site. I start off by its first sketch­ing out a few ideas to try to get  an idea of what I think is going to work. I then start lay­ing out my best cou­ple of ideas in Illus­tra­tor so I can phys­i­cally have each lay­out side by side on the art board to see which one is work­ing the best, and some­times com­bin­ing ele­ments from both lay­outs to cre­ate the final mock-up.

When I’m lay­ing things out I’m nor­mally do it using block col­ors, by block col­ors I mean no gra­di­ents some­times just black and gray to get an idea of how ele­ments are going to play off each other. once I’m happy with the gen­eral lay­out I start adding col­ors, gra­di­ents and other ele­ments to move the design into its  final mocked up. From there I move into Pho­to­shop because I feel I have greater con­trol over gra­di­ents and other styl­is­tic ele­ments that I can add. From there I move on to slic­ing up the images and export­ing them for use and CSS/HTML coding.

Wrap­ping Up

I’m not say­ing that there is a wrong way to use Pho­to­shop, some just feel more com­fort­able in Pho­to­shop to thus using it for every­thing. And if you’re just a web designer and you mock up and laid every­thing out in Pho­to­shop  because that’s what you’re most com­fort­able with, and your process works I would say you’re using it cor­rectly.  Here I’m talk­ing about the idea of design­ers using Pho­to­shop for every­thing and not tak­ing advan­tage of the  many other great tools that are out there. But the idea that it can do every­thing I find a lit­tle unrea­son­able and there is a rea­son Adobe makes many other programs.

Pho­to­shop is a great pro­gram and my work­flow would be lost with­out it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to neglect other pro­grams that will help me get a job done faster and bet­ter. So how do you use Photoshop?

Now the idea about using Pho­to­shop to design logos is a whole other topic in itself, one I will save for  another time.