Why Photoshop can be a bad thing for designers

Too many designers choose one tool and one tool only for their design, its seems like the end all and be all for many designers out there ...Photoshop. Here are my top reasons why every designer needs to break away from photoshop and use other tools to design with.

1. Raster Based

   This can be a great thing for flexibility in creation, where else can you paint with a fine degree and apply filters to affect each pixel in you artwork. But with a raster based application there are many problems, handling anti-aliasing is a constant issue when working in a raster app and many times image fidelity is lost when doing even the simplest transforms to an element.

2. Canvas is inflexible

   Photoshop doesn't support a slug area on a document, in fact you cant even see beyond the extents of the canvas, this makes it hard to manipulate and visualize what is going on in the areas beyond the canvas and makes it hard to manipulate items that are larger than the canvas.

3. Layer Based not Object based

   Each separate design element is forced to reside on a separate layer. In photoshop, the interaction between layers is limited and grouping and organization of elements is almost nonexistent.

4. One piece of the larger puzzle

   Different applications make it easier to accomplish different things, why limit creativity to what one application can do verses using another that is specifically designed to complete that particular task. With most file formats being standardized and many allowing virtual linking to files, when one tool is not suited for a specific task use another that is.

5. Lacks advanced guide systems

   Creating a grid quickly and getting everything to line up fast can be quite tricky in photoshop, although the alignment toolset has matured very well over the last few versions, they still can not top what is provided in Illustrator and Indesign.

6. Too many bells and whistles

   More often then not many new designers become to engrossed in the wide array of filters effects that photoshop has to offer lose focus on the sole purpose of the tool...to design. Designing is not about how cool a piece looks or what the newest and coolest looking effect is. Designing is about communicating emotionally to a viewer a message, idea or culture. Many people choose to design using the most basic toolset out there proving that it can be done and done well. While photoshop may have to most advanced toolset out there and make designing fun and flexible It should be used wisely and users should have a firm grasp on why things work the way they do, without this understanding, creativity is limited by what photoshop can produce automatically and not by what you can do with the toolset photoshop provides.

Dreamweaver 4 beta

I had the chance today to install and begin using the Dreamweaver cs4 beta. Although I haven't spent to much time diving into the more advanced (and probably more useful) features, here's what I have found so far.

At first glance, the interface has more of a professional feel...No longer am I working in an interface that feels more like a toy box than a tool-set. Panels can be minified alike the rest of the CS3 products. And you now can easily switch and modify workspace layouts for particular tasks.

The File manager refreshes without user interaction. In previous versions it has been noted that the file structure usually required a click of the refresh button in the panel...so far today I haven't had to push it once. In fact the file structure updates almost immediately.

Design View ACTUALLY WORKS!!! Armed with webkit as the design view renderer, Dreamweaver 4 can be put into "live-view" mode and renders the view as compliant HTML or XHTML (did I mention it was using webkit!!!!!). Albeit the webkit rendering is not available when the user is directly manipulating the design view, but again that is a bad habit of many web novices and should be avoided all together.

I believe that this next release of Dreamweaver may have finally sold me on using it vs. other packages like Panic's Coda.