With my post about pixel-perfect guides in Photoshop consistently being the site’s most popular, I thought a new series of Photoshop-related posts might be in order. This will be the first of an irregular series about Photoshop Basics, wherein I’ll talk about some of my most used—but basic—tips, tricks, shortcuts, and skills to help you use Photoshop more efficiently or effectively.

What follows is a smorgasbord of quick tips that, as a web developer, I use nearly every day.
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Though I’ve long known of the Windows Alt- and Mac Option-key codes for producing extended characters, I’ve only recently discovered a couple different shortcuts that allow the same thing under Linux.

A discussion at Daily Writing Tips about em-dashes, specifically regarding when to use them, spun in the direction of how to produce em-dash characters.

The immediate and obvious suggestion was to rely on word processors’ automatic character replacement—which generally involves swapping out two minus signs for “—” as-you-type. It was also pointed out, however, that there are specific key sequences you can use within different OSes to produce these characters without benefit of a word processor.

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Websites exist for sharing information.

Whether it’s news of your latest big product release, general info about your company or industry, or a story about your day in the park with your dog, chances are you’re putting it out there for people to read. Since the days of Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, and, of course, Google, search engines have been a big part of that goal.

Building your site to entice search engines to index and favorably place your pages has gone from the brute-force spider-baiting methods of the late 90′s, to the… well, brute-force spider-baiting methods of the 2000′s.

SEO has become an acronym, but many SEO companies still seem focused on keyword bombing, link farming, and site “build-out.” This approach does kind of work, so these guys can get away with it up to a point and sell their clients on their “success,” but it usually means leaving two things behind: 1) your customers, and 2) sane, usable content.

There is a better way. It is possible to build search engine friendly sites without making your site look like a dictionary or random pile of keywords. With a little bit of time and effort, a good understanding of your site’s real goals (“getting a top search ranking” is not a real goal), and some thoughtful copywriting, you can serve your customers a readable, usable site and still rank well in your target searches.

As I see it, there are two basic principles of SEO:

1. Understand how the spiders see your site’s pages,
2. and create compelling, accessible, usable content, and organize it so spiders can see it.

I’ll talk about these a bit more in-depth, but not necessarily in great detail–this post is merely intended to offer an overview, and perhaps a better general approach to SEO, not blow-by-blow implementation guidelines. With that disclaimer in place, let’s continue…

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There are many issues to deal with when designing for the web, and one of the most fundamental—and seemingly hard to understand or remember—is the simple fact that the end user ultimately has control over font size, not the designer. I’ve seen many gorgeous designs that are completely untenable if the fonts are enlarged by even a single point size.

In this post, I’m going to look at a singular expression of this problem, but it should be remembered that this is just one possible example. The possibility of font resizing should be considered when designing any and every piece of a website.

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Back when I was strictly a front-end guy (meaning HTML/CSS/JavaScript, ya potty-minded sleezebags!) I had to muck around in Photoshop every day. A big part of my job was taking files—usually from people who had little to no idea how I did my job—and cutting them up into building blocks for a webpage. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of sloppy Photoshop files, and have figured out a few things that a lot of designers apparently never seem to notice.

When I started, table-based layouts were the gold-standard, as they were really the only way of exerting any form of control over a layout, HTML-wise. Because of the way tables worked, elements in web layouts had to be sized and aligned to pixel-perfection, otherwise, things just ended up looking all screwy. Unfortunately, back then, getting pixel-perfect layouts was like winning the dollar lottery with a fifty cent ticket. (It didn’t happen, see.*) Today things are a bit better, and the rise of CSS allows for both more and easier layout control, and for a somewhat reduced requirement for pixel-perfection.

This is definitely not to say that designers should be let off the hook—if you’re executing a gridded layout, or a series of thumbnails and the edges don’t line up or the thumbnails aren’t all the same dimensions, then you’re being lazy, or sloppy, or both. The fact that Photoshop gives you fairly elegant tools to avoid these problems means that there’s really no excuse for it.

That being said, there are some things that can make a designer’s job harder. I’m planning to post a few of the Photoshop tips, tricks, and guidelines I’ve picked up as a web developer, starting with this one, dealing with a particularly annoying and quirky behavior of Photoshop’s guides.

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