Why We Skip Photoshop vs. Why We Don’t Skip Photoshop – I think the lesson learned here is that teams work the way that suits them best. 37Signals has the luxury of being able to design for themselves, and has established a set of design standards that they can ripple throughout their products. Whereas at Blue Flavor – which is a business more similar to PowerServe, I’d imagine – Photoshop is an integral part of the design process that cannot be ignored.
I like the concept of sketching things down on paper and then going directly to HTML, but in most cases, that’s just not practical – especially if your goal is to design something that doesn’t look vanilla. What works for one person, one team, one company isn’t necessarily going to work for another.
I’ve been known to build sites both ways. Ultimately it depends on the level of visual complexity the client wants.
Funnily, I’ve actually taken to designing sites in Illustrator, because I’m a lot more proficient with that program than I am with Photoshop.
For me, it’s easier just to do it in Photoshop simply because if/when I’m ready to build the design out, I can easily isolate and then slice up the different elements that I’ll then use in the build-out.
Building sites in Illustrator seems foreign to me. I have no problem using it for logo design or illustrations… but seeing as Photoshop supports Smart Objects and vector shapes and whatnot… I tend to do most of my design work there.
To each his own though, right? :)