Choosing a Design Software - Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator?

Photoshop and Illustrator are both indispensable for the production of a website design. In order to be an effective Web designer, it is important to know not just how to design - but also choose the right tools to do the job.

Let us look at the differences, features, and strengths of the two most popular design software.

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Table of contents

Designing with Photoshop

Photoshop is the most widely used tool for image editing. Photoshop is often used for complicated image processing needs or to perform mild corrections to an image. Photoshop deals with "bitmap" data, which is made up of collections of points.

The great appeal of Photoshop is the ability to adjust attributes of an image, such as lightness, saturation, and hue, etc. Additionally, it is possible to create "layers" to process parts of images more precisely. Since image manipulation and editing operations for each layer is easy, you can edit only the layers where revisions are necessary.

In addition, Photoshop also has a "slice" function that divides an image into multiple parts. It cuts out a design in an arbitrary range defined by the user and saves it as a separate image file without hurting the original design data. It is an essential function for Web Designers and it is used to extract parts from the design to be used in later development.

Photoshop also features the ability to export and save files in a format that can be edited with other tools such as JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, PDF, Targa, and TIFF.

Producing parts of the design with Illustrator

Illustrator is a software that handles "vector" data, whose image quality does not degrade even if the image is enlarged or reduced. By using Illustrator, you can intuitively design the layout of objects such as the detailed drawing of logos, graphics, and text.

It is easy to create complicated figures because objects in Illustrator have associated effects such as "Fill", "Color" "Line width", "Stylize", etc. In addition, frequently used functions like "Appearance" allows the finer description of lines and fills, and "Path finder" allows you to combine and divide objects.

The charm of Illustrator is that you can apply detailed designs to text and graphical objects. If you want to use illustrations in Web Design, you may create them in Illustrator, edit them, and then place them into a design comp created in Photoshop.

What software should you choose?

Both Photoshop and Illustrator are essential software for design, but Photoshop is most often used for website creation and Illustrator is used for print production.

However, if you are planning to work on elaborate website production projects, it is advisable to learn to use Illustrator along with Photoshop. Today, the design process is usually distributed between the two software, based on the object being designed.

In conclusion

Photoshop and Illustrator are essential tools for the creation of websites. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and by understanding that, you can optimise your design process to achieve the best results.

If you want to learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator efficiently, we invite you to take a look at our Web Design courses.