I used to do web work for a designer who would mock up the design in the program of the designer’s choice, in this case, Quark, and then send me the pages to turn into XHTML, CSS, and dynamic forms and pages.
Recently, David Heinemeier Hansson, 37signal’s erstwhile programming genius, has been writing on the need for a templating language (or lack thereof).
David believes that a designer should be able to mock up the pages that a user sees so that the programmer can correctly get feel for the flow and can create the proper interaction for the user.
When you’re just photoshop comping, you’re merely painting pretty pictures. Those pretty pictures may or may not translate well into designs. My experience has been that they are way more “pretty” than useful. They also tend to make you focus way to much on looks and way to little on interaction. You can’t interact with a photoshop comp, but you can easily interact and get a feel for a flow of five HTML screens linked together.
Now, this designer I did work for would send me an inordinate amount of material. This would include every, absolutely, every page drawn out in Quark. Menus tended to be broken up for no apparent reason, and graphics were sent in the fashion of print designers (uncropped, unedited). Quark would display the cropped version of the files, but it was simply a link.
David had something to say about what he’s calling “Photoshop Templating”:
Additionally, it’s a big waste. Doing the whole thing in photoshop, then redoing everything in HTML is wasteful. It certainly depends on your organization, but getting real faster, going HTML sooner, is a way to do big things with small teams.
Needless to say: “I wasn’t doing big things.”
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