Ask HN: What do designers you work with use to provide assets to you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do designers you work with use to provide assets to you?

2 pointsten713 comments

I run a small interactive shop in Minneapolis (TEN7.com) and we work with designers all the time. We've required them to provide layered Photoshop files to us so that we can create the designs, both in Desktop and Mobile. It's worked great. We've never encountered a designer for whom this is an issue.

We're now working with someone who has basically accused us of being out of touch, saying that "Most designers I know do not think of Photoshop as a "design" program. A lot that I talk to prefer to do layouts in indesign and then present pdf files with multiple layout versions to clients." Basically, she's designed everything in InDesign, used that to show mocks to our mutual client, and then she recreates them in PSD for "the developers".

As far as I am concerned, this is idiotic. Just use Photoshop to begin with, and you're done.

What I really want to know is whether I'm the crazy one? So, community poll... what do the designers you work with provide to you? Photoshop? InDesign? Fireworks? Illustrator? Something else? HELP!

Why would you design in InDesign first, then recreate it in Photoshop? That's ridiculous; you're doing twice the work.

I've been moonlighting as a freelance web developer for 8 years now for a guy in Toronto Canada and he always sends me PSD files to slice and dice.

Recently, I've been working with a new designer local to me in NY; fresh out of college. She wanted to know how to send me the designs so I sent her one of the ones I get from my guy in Toronto. She had absolutely no problem following the layout; how the design was broken into groups, labeled, ordered, etc...

PSD or bust. And no, Pixelmator isn't the same.

That's exactly what I thought. Complete and utter waste of time. Plus, the designer is charging the client to "convert" it as an additional fee. Just crazy.

Most designers I work with 99% use Photoshop.

The best designers I've met, they use Photoshop just for manipulating images, etc. They also use Fireworks (adobe is not supporting any longer), etc.

I think who designs for web, could and should know how to create prototypes. I don't think Photoshop is the best tool for design. Principles like Master Page and so on, are non-existent in Photoshop...

Anyway, I hate to open PSD files, photoshop is slow. I usually pick the full merged JPG and work on that. Cut images from that etc (everything not perfect with errors, etc). Then I share the image folder with the designer and he substitutes the images for me etc - this is usually already coded, so as long as he position the images properly etc overwritting it is fine!

I do publishing and we go straight Indesign. Covers are made in Photoshop.

You cut images and layout from InDesign? What do you mean by Covers?

We produce a scientific journal with associated promotional materials, every issue there is one cover which is produced in Photoshop. The advertising materials are made in InDesign (our designer gives us 2 choices for each item) and each issue is programatically layed out in IDML by my software and touched up by a some kid I found at a coffee shop. I do computer work for this group and I wouldn't call us particularly profitable.

Photoshop or Illustrator files.

Options:

InDesign

Photoshop

Other

Illustrator

Fireworks

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