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• 37 Signals - Why we skip Photoshop

  What a dumb article. It feels like it was written by someone who just wasn’t very skilled at photoshop. Three days to make a mockup? More like 3 hours. Of course you shouldn’t spend 3 days mocking something up, but it’s still an important step in the design process.
  
  Making a photoshop mockup allows you to quickly try totally different things. It’s true that once you have the structure you can easily “change the float from left to right” but what about trying a totally different grid? In photoshop you can just drag it around. I can’t imagine any type of code being faster than clicking and dragging, no matter how fast you are. You click…and drag.
  
  The only point I do agree with is the type issue, but once again it can partially be fixed if you are familiar with photoshop, by controlling the anti-aliasing and using paragraph boxes instead of inline text boxes. But still, you obviously are going to actually add the actual text with HTML.
  
  Once again, I think the article misses the point about attention to details. True that it’s important to not get caught up in the details when starting a design, but one of the most important elements in a design is the grid. Without making a mockup, its pretty hard to finalize a good grid.
  
  Edit: I saw this on HN, and I think this comment sums it up well:

  There was a recent post on HN about Apple requiring designers to do pixel-perfect mockups before they got approval to move forward.
  
  I am guessing the right solution is somewhere in the middle.

  
  
  Edit 2: I didn’t want to repost this, but Cameron quoted another good observation I had meant to include as well:
  

  The simple sort of visual treatments they’re using […] are very easy to produce with CSS.

  
  The quoted article has a lot of good points, and I will leave it at that.
  3 Jun 2008 / 2 notes