Meetup Notes - Designing a Web App

Design Meetup @ The Iron Yard-Austin

I learned some Photoshop tonight! Abby Larner led the meetup attendees through a small “pet” project. I have embarked on a quest multiple times over the years to learn Illustrator and Photoshop, but it always ended with me not figuring out how to select or delete or modify what I just created. These are such complicated programs!

We started with a wireframe and needed to learn the use of some basic tools in Photoshop to create items and manipulate them. Honest truth, I was a slow learner here. Some of the tools’ layouts seem counter-intuitive to me, even as a longtime Mac user (or maybe in spite of that). I definitely made plenty of notes in my fancy Baron Fig notebook (with a dot grid) about keyboard shortcuts and the order of a needed workflow. This will prove valuable later when I have gotten hungry or distracted by some other aspect of life, and necessarily forgotten how to get anything done in PS.

On a practical note, using Photoshop will likely prove to be extremely useful to me as a developer. Designers will make a mock-up of a website and provide a .psd file (the proprietary format used by Adobe for a Photoshop file). This file will have the exact dimensions and colors needed to build a website from that design idea, which will allow me to create a pixel perfect recreation for the client (and designer!).

So, here’s to many more encounters with this behemoth program. I have a feeling that, like with most deeper computer technology things, it will prove to be a long road to get the most out of it. Perhaps I will even get a high-quality camera and learn to really use the program for it’s original intent!

Humbly borrowed from dribbble

Written by Mike Mathew who lives and works in Dallas building useful things. Sometimes he posts on Mastodon. Mike also wears many hats at Presto Assistant where he is a co-founder, owner, and product engineer.