Going directly from idea to coded design to show client.

October 22nd, 2008 | Filed in: Articles, Web Design |

I’ve been reading more and more people who are really advocates for showing clients coded designs and never Photoshop/Fireworks files. Their biggest reason for this is the fonts. You can really never get accurate font preview in a Photoshop file as compared to the final web result. This is an argument that I fully buy. It’s pointless to try to show how a design will look with fonts in a web browser, but in a jpeg file instead.

The real main con, as I see it, with this method is that it is going to take a little more time. It does mainly depend on how fast of a coder you are. It’s so much simpler just to send of a jpeg file to a client with the design in, have them change their mind as usual and then code it. To me that seem like the most logical order (perhaps since I’m used to it by now), partly probably because I’m working faster in Photoshop than I code.

There is perhaps a mid-range option here. What you’ll do is that you do the design in Photoshop as usual, save out a jpeg file (with no fonts) and then just quickly place a floating, absolute div over the jpeg file, previewing how the fonts would look on your design.

I want to bring up just another bit as well; my personal experience with this. I must say I’ve yet to get a client that complains when they get their final version that it differed like the one I showed “before”. If most people know it is sample, or don’t care about the change, I don’t dare to speculate in just now but it gets me thinking if I really need to put that much energy into finding a solution to a thing that isn’t super broke.

In the end, my opinion about this on the whole, is that if you are a quick coder. By all means, do show clients a coded version if the coding for you is one of the heavy parts, then don’t. Showing the designs in a jpeg file seems to work and I’m not sure how much difference it would mean to clients if you showed the coded one.

Now, if Adobe would just get an option in the type tool to render the text as a web browser does, I’d be much happier…