What do Designers Prefer for Web Design: Photoshop or Illustrator?

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Even though Photoshop was previously labeled as the most effective tool for creating websites, the web design community has happily embraced the dependable Illustrator for being more than capable of satisfying all their web design needs. Owing to a wide range of its layout tools, Illustrator has undeniably replaced the preciously dominant Photoshop as a more appropriate and suitable choice for creating web design.

Let’s discuss why Illustrator is beginning to function as being a standard tool for managing superior web design workflow.

Not long ago, web designers had been creating the same button, widget or icon in Photoshop every day! Now, thanks to the symbols used in Illustrator, they can easily save their precious time by avoiding this repetition.

Fundamentally, symbols are a never-ending stock of handy design elements which can be conveniently added to artwork by using an effortless drag and drop, that can be changed if required.

This implies that every time you want to make any change to a unique symbol, these changes without any delay get reflected in all instances of the symbol featured in your artwork. In case designers require larger buttons across the site, they simply need to tweak the symbol instead of creating it from scratch.

Web designers have the ease to create a rectangle with rounded corners in Photoshop; however, Illustrator enables you to induce the non-destructive rounded corners effect to almost any object. If you are not sure what a non-destructive effect is, it simply means that it can be turned on or off without affecting the underlying original object.

This not only retains design consistency but also make the workflow more efficient. Moreover, with the likely heavy emphasis in the future on responsiveness and speed of websites, it is only reasonable to expect that as your website shifts shapes and sizes, so to must its graphics (ie. SVG & pixel fonts).

However, in several other cases, web designers may still be better off developing designs in Photoshop, nonetheless, Illustrator isn’t that far behind. In a lot of our design work at Genetech Solutions, our design team deploys them in tandem, and they’ve found Illustrator especially useful while designing UI’s.

Listed below are the broad advantages arising out of designing wireframes in Illustrator:

• Its vector-driven nature lends itself easily to graphic & text designing, speeding the wireframe drawing process
• Buttons & icons are grouped together library-style, and can be incorporated quickly into the wireframe
• Once the basic wireframe has been finalized, the road to final design can be surprisingly quick, since you’ve already incorporated most of the layout & content in the wireframe. On some occasions, all it takes is style-sheets and graphic-style application to the text etc.

At Genetech Solutions, we apply the best tools of Illustrator as well as Photoshop according to the needs of our client for designing customized and inventive web designs to serve their needs. Get in touch with us to know whether Photoshop or Illustrator will best cater to your next web design project.

Shamim Rajani is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Genetech Solutions, a one stop shop for all web services specializing in Web Development, Customized Web Applications, Social Media Marketing and other IT related services. Follow her on twitter @ShamimRajani & Linkedin.

Shamim Rajani