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Photoshop or Illustrator

by: BWC on 24th Jul, 2010

Well in short, both!

Some may find this a silly question with an equally obvious answer but strangely only last week was I asked this question for the umpteenth time so I thought I would shed some light on how I use the two for web design (in fact most things).

Illustrator: design layout, vector asset creation.
Photoshop: image manipulation and post web assets

First I always use illustrator as my prime method in designing and building the various assets for a site. It's my main canvas, very fast and you can create accurate shapes and elaborate objects that you would struggle doing in Photoshop. I always work to exact screen dimensions, proportions and fonts as the finished thing. The end result will form the PDF file I initially send or present to clients at the ideas stage.

Photoshop is generally used in combination with Illustrator when creating certain effects or manipulating the vector graphics before being saved for web. I copy and paste directly into Photoshop and store most things as Smart Objects. This means I can resize, modify and save the same objects many times without the usual bitmap degredation occuring. You simply double click a Smart Object and it opens the original Vector version ready for the amend.

I never paste an entire webpage design into Photoshop and start slicing and dicing (although some people do). I have always found this a somewhat crude process which obviously doesn't allow you to make a fast amend to a specific section of the page that might overlap with others. However for HTML newsletters that's usually the process I follow.

During a project I usually end up with a couple master .ai files with all the original assets and shapes on one big canvas and several dozen .psd files which might be rollover buttons, cropped images or site structure files which can be quickly amended and saved for web when needed.

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