A few days ago Jason Powell from 37signals posted a piece titled “Why We Skip Photoshop“, only for it to be met by almost utter disbelief by other designers around the world.

To be honest I fell in love with the whole article. It is bold statements like this that have made their Blog Signal vs Noise one of the most popular design Blog’s in the entire universe, and definitely one of the most controversial. The people behind 37signals deserve all the success they’ve gathered through their web applications and the Ruby-on-Rails framework.

Most Web Designers work to a very similar schedule that has been instilled into them from the beginning whilst learning their trade. Even though Photoshop as an application isn’t catered in the slightest for Web Design for the majority of designers out there Photoshop IS Web Design. Once analysis and rough design stages are complete (if they existed in the first place) the user will move straight into Photoshop and come up with a design for the web page. This design will then act as the ‘prototype’ of the finished web page, albeit it being completely static and unusable aside from being an image. Once this is done the layers of the image are split into separate bits and coded into a web page. It all sounds easy enough in writing, but it is hard work for many out there, including me.

The recent post by 37signals implied to many that they simply do not use Photoshop when creating a Web Application or any other site. Many others have taken it as a message that they shouldn’t use Photoshop to create their web pages!

What some people seem to forget is that they are NOT 37signals.

The reason they have chosen this approach is because their creative and functional aims require time to work on the actual product and for less time to be ‘wasted’ in creating a mock-up that won’t even be needed. When you’re a company that prides itself on your simplistic approach to designing applications for the Web, that already has a design that most likely existed within Photoshop for a period of its life, then why would you need to use Photoshop or any other graphic editing program?

Many have made arguments from within the Blog post itself that bring up several good points like being able to share paper sketches with others from around the world? Well, for the time it takes to jump straight into coding a web application that has already had a thought-out design sketched out then the time difference won’t really matter. Should we really need to design structure that will purely come from coding in the first place?

Just because an extremely popular web application company decide that they want to do something it doesn’t mean that you have to jump on the bandwagon. Bandwagons in Web Design/Development are fantastic, but only when they can benefit you or your knowledge. If you want to ditch using Photoshop then go ahead and try it, but don’t expect your experience to be exactly what Jason claimed it to be! We’re all individuals, and what works for them will most likely not work for you.