Your guide to the perilous waters of the internet

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is a web designer's best friend. While not an easy program to learn, Photoshop, like Flash and Illustrator has a high "WOW!" factor. Whether starting from a blank white page, or beginning with scanned in images the possibilities are endless for creativity of a digital nature.

I have been pleased to discover my background and training as a fine artist gives me a distinct advantage in interface design and image manipulation. In my job as a Web Designer with Artifex BID, I was asked time and again to perform relatively simple (to me) tasks in Photoshop. We had brilliant ASP, JSP and even C++ programmers, but they would bring their pixel tasks to me.

Interface design is not something one can learn overnight. To build an interface from scratch, one must have an encyclopedic understanding of the limitations of the various browsers and operating platforms and the havoc they play with html. To be effective as an interface designer, one must study and practice constantly, building up a stable of tricks, techniques, shortcuts and most importantly: patience. Like a skilled pianist running through his scales, high end Photoshop users frequently work exercises to fine tune their skills. Here are some of mine.

Interfaces frequently go through many growing pains during the early design stages. They are often not pretty to look at as simple black shapes are pushed around in the channels and paths palettes, or effects, filters and masks are tried and discarded. At the end of the day though, when sophisticated design glows quietly from the screen, and later when the same design is carefully sliced and tiled into standards compliant xhtml and flows bug free across all browsers and operating platforms, one can say with pride, "yes, I am an interface designer." Of course, then the customer decides that he really wanted the navigation on the top, instead of the sides, and can we "try a look that is slightly more techno?" These are all normal and expected parts of the design process.

Interface design is the most rewarding, and challenging, thing I have done in Web Design. For the graphic work, Photoshop is the tool of choice. The graphics in this web site interface were created in Photoshop. To see other examples of interfaces I have built, please visit my URL's page.