As designers, we spend too much time in Photoshop. Now that it’s expected that your sites will be responsive, mocking up static designs in Photoshop isn’t an effective way of communicating what the final result will look like. Not only is it a waste of time, but it’s annoying to boot.
We’re going to talk about getting out of the Photoshop mindset, embracing the tools that the modern web has provided us in order to streamline our development practises and get real-live sites up and running fast. We’ll start with talking about how to use style tiles to reduce the amount of time spent on mockups, and then we’ll move on to discuss how to leverage available tools in order to quickly get a site running: skeleton themes, CSS precompilers, version control for quick deployment, icon fonts, browser development tools, grids, and CSS frameworks. Whew!
After all that, you’ll walk away with new ideas about how to design your own toolset to get up and running with a functioning site as quickly as possibly, and how to iterate on that in way that’s efficient and sane.
Prerequisites: You should have a basic knowledge of WordPress theme development, and perhaps a sneaking suspicion that you’re relying too heavily on Photoshop.
