If you don’t find something new &/or interesting in at least one of the sites listed then you are either:

• Some sort of code-god-know-it-all
• Or you think my site is about a different topic and you are lost on those interwebs again.

(Safety Tip: Shout aloud for help, maybe someone in the next room will come save you.
You might also try the button on your LifeAlert® – “Help I’ve JuggoPop’d and I can’t get out”)

If either of those sound like you then I’m not sure what you are going here. Just keep pressing back on your browser until you get back to the fork in the road. At that point, you may want to take a different direction. Good luck!

I have a full CS4 suite at work. However, I have a new computer at home and have not got around to getting Photoshop here. I honestly don’t do enough work at home to warrant it, …yet. However, that day is getting closer. Going to have to pony up at some point.

(Side note: My old machine had a legal copy from a previous employer as I worked for them telecommuting. My current boss, however,  is not paying for me to get Photoshop at home… oh well.)

However, there are times when I am finishing up some work from home or wanting to just play around with a personal site like this one. I can tell you first hand it adds a level of skill to jump around to online editors or try free substitutes.

For someone like me, who has 11 years of professional Photoshop experience, I don’t have to think to use the program. I just think about what I am wanting to achieve and my hands just do the work without me mentally getting involved in the “click here, select that” type of actions. Think of a person that types 90 words a minute, are they looking at the keyboard and thinking, “ok, the spacebar I press with my thumb.” No, they just think about the code or text they are wanting to insert and their hands are just putting it there. That’s the way I feel in Photoshop.

Why do knockoff versions have to suck?

When trying some new software (a knockoff or an online version of something) I spend more time poking around to do the simplest things. A good example of something I might do from home and need a quick image edited would be in cross browser testing.

Say I have a site finished and I need to test my linear-gradients. IE is going to throw a fit and fallback to the background color. And you will of course loose any multiple backgrounds you might be running in that area. (I personally don’t like IE filters because they break on rounded corners, not to mention look like ass most of the time)

So if I have Photoshop up and running a quick firebug of the area in Firefox (turning on any hover state versions), grab a screenshot, toss it in Photoshop, a few tweaks to allow it to expand to solid colors… and BAM in two minutes I have a nice fallback image.

If I am not around Photoshop, that two minutes turns into 30+ minutes, or more if I am trying a new program. And in the end I may not even like the results as much or the file size, or whatever.

However… removal sometimes forces new learning.

I will say that CSS3 knowledge minus an install of Photoshop can be a fun learning experience. Recently I was playing around with a layout and wanted to create curved ribbons for the section titles (ones that wrap around the content area on one side). I was just tired of seeing the same old triangle versions of straight ribbons that are popular these days.

Anyway, I had no image editor worth using, so I started firebugging. With a little more creative thinking I was able to create a fully rounded, shaded ribbon that looked exactly like something made in Photoshop. I had no extra markup. It was nothing more than a single H2 tag.

(Side Note: I’ll post a tutorial when I have something decent to create the images in <wink>)

It’s the moments like those that make pushing yourself to grow so much fun.

Thoughts?

So again, I ask…

Any designers out there ever have to
go without using Photoshop?

If so, did it make you grow in your other skills? If not, you should turn it off for about a month and see what new ideas spring to life.