Photoshop is not a design tool.

It is a communication tool.

Leigh Taylor Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 4, 2013

I have spent my entire professional career sweating the intricacies of Photoshop, practising and perfecting my workflow in order to produce the ‘ultimate’ presentation of design, for myself and the people I work with.

A badge of honour I wore proudly. No longer was there a need for tutorials, user manuals, walk throughs or advice. I became the master craftsman I always wanted to be. Quality focused, efficient and prolific. Known amongst friends as “the guy you go to for Photoshop help”.

However, I never felt satisfied or secure with the output. It seemed incomplete, static, fragile. I knew this delicate image would have to compete with uncertainty and questioning from the team. Hours spent in conversation leading to many perceived compromises to get the design built.

I would come away from these reviews, more often than not, feeling defeated. Mentally drained, frustrated and bewildered. Why have I spent so many hours, weeks or months on a design for it to just be talked about.

I fought the realisation for a long time. Years of my life dedicated to design when in reality it was just perfecting the presentation of pixels.

The harsh reality is that anything you ‘design’ in Photoshop is throw-away. A talking point. A reference for discussion. A platform to build from. It is never a definitive piece.

Design realised comes from a collaboration of skills. A collective effort. It takes time to make the implicit explicit, erase the uncertainty and find that common goal to aim for.

We do the design but more often than not it isn’t in Photoshop. It is being done in the implicit boundaries where people collaborated. Conversations, sketches, documentations, diagrams and feedback. Finally, understanding the limitations of Photoshop as a design tool highlighted its strengths as a communication tool.

The importance of Photoshop diminished for me. I yearned for the design to live. I encouraged, no forced the hand, to get it in code quicker. You can’t illustrate the nuances of animation, real-time feedback and ‘feel’ in photoshop. You can try but it usually comes in the form of a story board quickly flicked through in an image preview—trust me I have done it!

The next step was moving more towards code. I can code front-end but choose not to. I just don’t enjoy it. The gap between the text editor and the visual feedback is too wide for me. I needed something quicker with less abstraction. Quartz Composer offered that glimmer of hope, it communicated the human computer interaction much better than Photoshop ever could. However, it would only do prototypes and the rumours of it being discontinued only reinforced what I feared.