UI/UX designers bid adieu to Photoshop; here’s their new favorite

Photoshop, Adobe’s flagship product, is being deserted by UI/UX designers.

With its rich toolkit, applications, and features, Photoshop has earned a reputation as the standard designing platform for web design, almost synonymous with the term itself. This design programme is compatible with practically all widely used operating systems. It contains almost all the essential tools for designing. This software enables you to construct an interface, fill it with visual and textual data, edit the images, and export the finished product in several formats. When it comes to graphics, Adobe Photoshop is the best designing platform in the market.

So what exactly is wrong with Photoshop?

Let’s discuss the limitations of Photoshop in relation to UI/UX.

• Photoshop primarily is a photo-editing software. It contains a lot of features related to photography that are rarely used by web designers. In addition, inspecting designs is difficult in Photoshop.
• Because of the umpteen number of features it offers, this platform can be quite RAM consuming and exerts a significant strain on your computer. 
• Mastering Photoshop is a task of its own. Many acknowledge that Photoshop’s UI is unintuitive. Therefore it is difficult, especially for beginners, to identify and use all the correct tools provided. 
• It lacks user flow animation, without which prototypes can hardly be qualified as one. Build-in page transitions and micro-interactions are absent in this platform. Designers have to take the additional strain to explain concepts to developers than demonstrate them directly to them.
• The most recent update brought in by Photoshop was the proto-version of live editing. However, this feature also falls short when compared to other competing design tools.

Better UI/UX alternatives to Photoshop

Figma

Figma provides each member in a team with a canvas so they can work together. It’s cloud-based software, so downloading, saving, and exporting is no longer necessary. It is the quickest and simplest method for creating designs and sending them directly to the programmers for use. One of the major advantages of Figma is that it conveniently converts designs into live sites. With Figma, you can generate suggestions and make changes to an existing design without tampering with the original file. However, this feature is currently only available in beta and to the teams on the Organization plan.

Similar to Photoshop, Figma offers the majority of its features for free with certain restrictions. However, it is preferable because you have unlimited cloud storage and can also invite viewers. With Figma, inspecting designs is simpler. When it comes to designing and altering components, this platform offers the most convenient working environment.

Sketch

If you are a Mac user, Sketch is your number one alternative to Photoshop. With a vast library of templates readily available in its community, Sketch is user-friendly and places a strong emphasis on UI design. Even for starters, it is incredibly portable and simple to use. Additionally, it permits the use of numerous screens that it builds very effectively to open quickly. The tool offers regular upgrades and a more practical license-per-year pricing structure. The user can continue to use the software even after the license expires, but only without the updates. Sketch’s ability to install plug-ins to streamline the workflow is one of its many advantages.

Sketch’s Assistant will give you hints and recommendations to improve your designs to get better results. The Assistant will show you a notification with a red light if it detects something you can make better which turns green after you’ve passed all the inspections and everything appears to be in good condition. The compatibility of this app is a significant benefit. Sketch files can be supported on Photoshop, XD, and Figma.

Adobe XD

Adobe’s attempt to break into the UX design market came in the form of the recently released Adobe XD. A major advantage of XD is the upgrades that usually always occur once a month and has an easy-to-use interface. It offers a free service but with certain limitations. Moreover, it helps to produce extremely interactive mockups with voice triggers in their prototypes. In addition, XD comprehends keyboard and gamepad triggers, auto-animates motion graphics, and has other unique capabilities for showcasing the work.

The latest updates allow one to create prototypes with multiple time triggers. Another essential feature is Repeat Grid, which enables you to make numerous copies of a design without copy-pasting. You choose an element on your canvas and move the border to get multiple duplicates of that piece. Then, if modifications are required, you only need to make one element and the rest will update on its own. The strength of this software is the animation of the prototypes.

Note: As of September 2022, Figma is to be acquired by Adobe.

Indeed all designing platforms come with their fair share of positives and negatives. Though Adobe Photoshop is one among the best for photo-editing and graphics, when it comes to UI/UX designs, online designing apps are the better choice when compared to Adobe Photoshop. Depending on the need and the compatibility, XD, Figma, and Sketch are among the top ranking platforms for excellent UI/UX designs.

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