As the internet is used increasingly often, the need for talented web designers increases. There are many aspiring graphic artists who want to create their own websites, but don’t have the coding skill required for web development. They work mainly with Adobe tools, such as Illustrator and In Design, which are industry standard web design tools. Photoshop though not used quite as commonly for web design, however is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, and so there are still many who use it for designing websites.
The challenge lies in getting a design from Photoshop to an actual, working HTML web design. This process is known as PSD slicing – taking a saved Photoshop .PSD file and breaking it apart into the individual elements that make up an HTML web page. Many web designers aren’t actually coders, and so can’t do this process themselves. For freelancers, there are a variety of hand coding service companies who will take a .PSD file and convert it into an HTML website. Corporate employees usually just need to hand the file over to the front-end web developers to have this done.
We’re going to give you a brief overview on how to do this process yourself. For this, you are going to need a .PSD file, and you need to know HTML basics. You start by opening up the .PSD file in Photoshop. What you have to do to get it into workable HTML elements is separate the many elements you see on-screen. You have to choose a background color, or create a background pattern out of what you used for a background, and then begin to structure elements on top of it.
There’s no exact way or order in which the process has to be done. You simply need to begin breaking your .PSD file apart into small pieces which can individually be written in HTML. You will probably want to separate it first into larger pieces, like the header, navigation, content, sidebar, and footer (or whatever other elements you may happen to have). Then break these down into individual elements – for instance, break down the navigation into individual buttons, by saving them all as separate images, and then writing the HTML code to have a stack of links.
PSD slicing is a tedious process, but it is the easiest way for many web designers to go from a site mock-up to a fully functioning HTML site.
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