chapter 9

Visual Tools

IN THIS CHAPTER, you’ll learn how web designers use Adobe Photoshop and related software to design comps, prepare typography and images, and convert the whole shebang into working web pages. Along the way, you’ll get the lowdown on image file types, learn design techniques that make a virtue of web images’ limitations, and see how the issues of color, bandwidth, and navigation discussed earlier in this book apply to the creation of web layouts in image editors. We’ll also chat about alternative web design methods that produce lighter, more accessible sites.

If you’ve read other web design books, some of the initial material in this chapter will be familiar to you, though we might take it places other books haven’t.

In short—pour yourself a tall one, fluff up your seat cushions, and get ready to burrow in.

PHOTOSHOP BASICS: AN OVERVIEW

Coming from the world of print, most art directors and designers are familiar with Adobe Photoshop as an image editing tool. In web design, Photoshop is that and more. In fact, Photoshop, along with its included ImageReady module, is most web designers’ primary imaging, layout, and production tool.

210 HOW: Visual Tools: Photoshop Basics

Some web designers use Macromedia Fireworks (www.macromedia.com/ software/fireworks/) to supplement or even replace Photoshop. Fireworks is a fine tool created specifically to serve the needs of web design. But as a transitioning designer or as one adding web work to an existing repertoire of design services, you will want to use the tools you know. And that means Photoshop/ImageReady and Illustrator. You will encounter Fireworks in some web agencies—Photoshop and Illustrator in all of them.

We’re assuming that you already know how to open an image in Photoshop, resize it as necessary, apply color correction, make selections, run filters, save the image in a particular format, and scream when the client tells you your multilayered masterpiece is “too busy.” If not, now might be a good time to brush up on your basic Photoshop skills (www.adobe.com/ products/tips/photoshop.html).

Following is an overview of key Photoshop functions in addition to the familiar tasks of resizing, color correction, blurring, and sharpening. Material that might be new to you will be covered in detail following the overview.

Comp Preparation

Unlike in the print world, where Quark XPress, Illustrator, and InDesign hold sway, most web designers create their page layouts entirely in Photoshop. You’ll use it to conceive designs and show them to clients.

Dealing with Color Palettes

In print, color is practically unlimited. Not so on the Web. Photoshop 5.5 (or higher) and its bundled sister product, ImageReady, handle this issue with ease and grace.

Exporting to Web-Friendly Formats

Each computing platform sports a native, bitmapped image format—PICT for Mac users and BMP for Windows. But web browsers are configured to display special, cross-platform image formats that trade quality for bandwidth. In designing web pages, you’ll use the compressed GIF and JPEG formats almost exclusively. The PNG format, an open standard with

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advantages including alpha channel transparency, is also beginning to enjoy support in newer browsers. Photoshop exports to all these formats, with advanced functions that make your job easier. It is also a fine tool for applying image compression during the exporting process.

Gamma Compensation

Photoshop easily handles the cross-platform gamma dilemma we discussed earlier in this book. (See “Gamma, Gamma, Hey!” in Chapter 2,

“Designing for the Medium.”)

Preparing Typography

Photoshop, together with Illustrator, enables you to prepare typographic images for the Web. Photoshop has become so adept at this task that many web designers now use it exclusively.

Slicing and Dicing

To turn a comp into a web page, most professionals find themselves slicing the comp into smaller component images and using HTML markup to put the pieces back together. Photoshop and ImageReady make this easy and painless, relieving you of the burden of hand-coding complexly nested HTML table cells and their associated image files.

Rollovers (Image Swapping)

The ever-popular rollover effect, in which one image is replaced by another when the visitor’s cursor “rolls” over it, is not just a meaningless gimmick. By emulating familiar Graphical User Interface (GUI) behavior, in which user actions trigger software reactions, rollovers can provide important cues to the way the site functions. Or they can just be meaningless gimmicks. Rollover effects are powered by JavaScript (or ECMAScript, as it now prefers to be called).

We’ll explore JavaScript in Chapter 11, “The Joy of JavaScript.” While there is no substitute for learning JavaScript and employing it creatively, in this chapter you’ll learn how ImageReady can automatically generate appropriate rollover scripts for you. These rollovers can be extremely sophisticated and might exceed many web designers’ hand-programming abilities.