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.