CSS Hat translates Photoshop layer styles to CSS3

by benackles • 14 years ago

167 75 14 years ago

sushi2• 14 years ago

I wonder how many people still use Photoshop to create mocksups first and then move to HTML/CSS. Ever since CSS3 became popular I create my mockups directly in HTML/CSS3.

lachyg• 14 years ago

I would say pretty much ever designer I know still use Photoshop to design first. I also know that the PSD to HTML businesses do HUGE turn over each year, so I think this is very much in demand.

_mayo• 14 years ago

It's still pretty prevalent. I'm currently consulting for a largish e-commerce site, and their creative department sends all their page designs over as PSDs.

jaz• 14 years ago

Photoshop is still pretty popular in web agencies.

drtse4• 14 years ago

Looks like they are about to release a tool for that too http://csspiffle.com/

terhechte• 14 years ago

Here's their pitch: http://pitch.csspiffle.com/ Looks quite impressive. The idea is really not new, I've been waiting for more than 4 years now for a good HTML5 tool to go beyond Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks/Whatnot. I hope their app lives up to the pitch.

jaems33• 14 years ago

Most people who work in an agency still do it this way as the roles are divided by specialty.

companyhen• 14 years ago

I always use Photoshop for my mockups for clients, but I'm still pretty new to web design.

I've only been at it about 5-6 months, with 1-2 years experience in graphic design. Any advice?

sushi2• 14 years ago

I think getting better at CSS would be my only advice. I got better at it by doing tutorials on https://css-tricks.com/.

One other thing I do is try to make sure I complete my web design without having to use any image or Javascript. When you limit yourself in this way, you find ways to accomplish in CSS/CSS3 and get better at it eventually.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

http://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup

josefresco• 14 years ago

Two things from someone with 12 years in professional web design: Switch to Adobe Fireworks now before you get too used to Photoshop. And ignore all of the engineering advice here about jumping straight to CSS/HTML.

Good web design begins much earlier than Photoshop/Fireworks, and doesn't even move to the graphics/proof stage until you've made dozens of decisions beforehand that will influence your design (think business goals, marketing messaging, platform, audience etc.) HTML/CSS is almost one of the last steps in a complete web project.

flyosity• 14 years ago

The only time I don't use Photoshop is when I'm doing a super simple design (very flat, no graphics) but other than that I'm pushing pixels in Photoshop first before I jump into HTML & CSS.

artursapek• 14 years ago

I prefer Illustrator, it's more "element-oriented" if you will. Easier to move things around. Even if it's lacking a good UI for styling.

wwweston• 14 years ago

A-men.

If you're missing the UI for styling, you might try Fireworks.

The idea that Photoshop should be used as a layout tool is an unfortunate accident of history -- it was/is the household name for image manipulation as most designers and developers hit the web. But while it's good for raster/photo editing, sets of pixel layers doth not a good layout/design tool make.

Illustrator's a lot better for this. And Fireworks is made for web layout and screen graphics, has a great mix of vector and raster tools, and is evolving some really sophisticated export abilities including some of the CSS export facilities CSS Hat is doing.

DavidAbrams3• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, Illustrator is essentially abandonware at this point. It's so hobbled by design defects and other bugs that you're much better off with Corel Draw, even if you have to run it in a VM on a Mac.

This is just one example:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2362/1800773495_d1f776e335.jpg

Many (most?) vector-drawing applications let you select only the items that are fully enclosed by a selection rectangle. So if you wanted to select only the circles in that image, you'd need only to draw a selection rectangle around them.

Illustrator gives you no way to do this. Every shape that comes into contact with the selection rectangle (or even the path of the lasso tool) is selected. You can fire up Windows and do the whole thing in Corel Draw in the time you'll waste tediously clicking on everything in Illustrator.

prawn• 14 years ago

Always Photoshop first. Last time (admittedly a while back) I read about someone creating their design directly in HTML/CSS, it was a rubbish design.

savories• 14 years ago

This is like starting a big coding project without first writing a plan.

It's best to prototype first be it on paper or photoshop.

Otherwise your design is shaped by programming requirements, rather than a fully thought out plan/experience.

erable• 14 years ago

This could be good -- any additional info that you can share? The details are somewhat scant and I'm greatly interested.

lukashurych3• 14 years ago

What would you like to know? Ask on team@csshat.com

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Hi erable, I can show you a sample CSS generated by current version: http://jsfiddle.net/tomaskafka/ZXgqN/

treelovinhippie• 14 years ago

"Now waiting for App store approval" - does that mean Mac only?

ldawoodjee• 14 years ago

Yep

LeZuse2• 14 years ago

No, it is not :) Although the initial release will be for Mac

DavidAbrams3• 14 years ago

Why and how is a Photoshop plug-in being sold only through the App Store?

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

I don't use Photoshop, but the hue-shifting glowing hat and floating words are a pretty cool effect.

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Thanks - I'll pass it on to Peter who made the effect ;)

michaelmior3• 14 years ago

"Hate Flash? Click here!" That one's clever :)

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

Pretty scummy, more like.

michaelmior3• 14 years ago

I think "scummy" is a bit of an overstatement. I would have preferred it if there was a message first explaining how CSS Hat helps you stop using Flash (I'm assuming that was the intent). I'd be more likely to tweet in that case.

why-el• 14 years ago

Mine said "hate IE6?". In any case I think it would have been both funny and effective if it led to their products page, something like here is how we will can take your pain away..Redirecting to twitter? I didn't like it.

michaelmior3• 14 years ago

Agreed. If they show me something awesome, that might give me a reason to send out a tweet. As it stands, I just closed the window.

jzd131• 14 years ago

Any news on when the beta version will be released?

lukashurych3• 14 years ago

CSS hat is going live next week :) So you can get it then ;)

joshuahornby• 14 years ago

What About Piffle? Been waiting far too long now keep checking every day.

sktrdie• 14 years ago

This is huge if they can pull it off. I wonder how accurately they can make it happen. Even if they're simply able to position layers exactly the same as in PS, it's already something I would use as being extremely useful. This could virtually allow you to not code in HTML/CSS3 anymore - which is something I really hate to do.

So would it output the HTML elements and give you CSS3 code for it? How about <forms> and other elements that aren't just simply <div>'s? Can you make those?

bzalasky• 14 years ago

I don't think this goes beyond gradients, patterns, shadows, etc... Still looks useful though.

nthitz• 14 years ago

It's just blending options from photoshop. It's not layout/positioning/sizing, although that would be boss.

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Hi sktrdie, we considered this, but we think that the output would become just a mess of absolutely sized and positioned divs - and that's not how websites should be made.

It is a coder's job to bring in the semantic structure and we merely aid to assist her/him - so CSS Hat will 'only' transform layer's fills and styles to CSS3. Hope that's cool :).

Tomas - one of CSS Hat devs

alexobenauer• 14 years ago

It looks like it only exports webkit-compatitble CSS. If this is the case, this would be really disappointing.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Not nearly as disappointing as the fact that Webkit has not become a standard in all browsers. We should all be working on a single rendering engine. Webkit has won, and should be the standard.

People/organizations can continue to experiment on components of that. V8 vs Nitro etc... We'll just have beta/dev forks of Webkit that can eventually be merged back into the core.

Browser fragmentation is fine. It's the rendering engines that are killing us.

cleverjake• 14 years ago

the html5 spec specifies exact parser behavior, and ensures the same rendering across all compliant browsers. If we did standardize rendering engines (which could /never/ happen, for an incredible number of sociopolitical reasons), what fragmentation would exist?

Competition creates innovation.

darkstalker• 14 years ago

CSS prefixes are dumb, why not just drop them?

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm dev from CSS Hat team - we will export regular CSS3, vendor extensions (webkit,moz,o) are optional. Thanks for interest! :)

pvidler• 14 years ago

From the link:

"Photoshop is required to use CSS Hat."

From their main site:

"CSS Piffle. No more photo editing software for web design!"

Eating their own dog food?

LeZuse2• 14 years ago

Well, a lot of people are stuck in Photoshop, unfortunately. That way there could be some transition from PS to straight HTML/CSS.

colinramsay• 14 years ago

Fireworks CS6 has something related to this. If you select an object in Fireworks, you can get the CSS which will build the shape, gradients, curved borders, etc.

http://layersmagazine.com/new-css3-support-in-dreamweaver-cs...

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Yep - kudos to Adobe for doing this; we discovered this while working on CSS Hat. We are in Photoshop, and from CS4 up, though :) Tomas (CSS Hat dev)

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Hi guys, I'm one of CSS Hat devs and I'd like to thank you for your interest and show a little bit more:

This is the output of current version of CSS Hat: http://jsfiddle.net/tomaskafka/ZXgqN/

mindhunter• 14 years ago

why '90deg'? using no direction, and otherwise 'to bottom' etc. for the non-prefixed and 'top', 'left' etc. for the prefixed gradients seems easier to understand.

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Thanks for an idea - so far we just take the angle Photoshop gives us, but it is true that we could convert it to words when the angle is multiple of 90 degrees :)

tluyben2• 14 years ago

Offtopic: can I have a Piffle invite? I'm very curious; we try out all these tools all the time at our company and none of them are really good. This looks promising, but that's the outside only for now of course.

tomaskafka8• 14 years ago

Oops - I didn't expect a comment after the initial wave, so I stopped watching the thread. At this time, I cannot advise you anything better than signing up at http://csspiffle.com - you'll be then first to know our news :).

unkoman• 14 years ago

Why is the page calling me a fag?

Nogwater• 14 years ago

That says "Faq". Notice how the loopy part of the descender goes to the right. I don't know why it's lowercased.

analog• 14 years ago

Definitely want text-transform:uppercase on that acronym with that font.

victorin• 14 years ago

That is exactly what I though :)

lukashurych3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the notice, it's fixed now.. :)

jokull• 14 years ago

What about exporting Stylus (/w nib) or at least LESS?

joshmlewis2• 14 years ago

It's not generating total stylesheets, just blocks of CSS from what I can tell. Although an option for loosing the ; and maybe a couple features SASS/LESS has would be nice, and shouldn't be too hard to pull off.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

Oh, common. Who keeps changing the submission titles? It is really getting out of hand lately. What was wrong with "{css:hat}" ?

michael_fine• 14 years ago

I think because "{css:hat}", while interesting and amusing, doesn't accurately display what it does.

jonmrodriguez• 14 years ago

The page title itself says "CSS Hat"

<title>CSS Hat translates layer styles to CSS3 code</title>

reflexer• 14 years ago

clever name

tomkin• 14 years ago

I was just talking about this with colleagues. If some piece of photo manipulation software centered its features for the web developer and actually outputted the CSS for shadows, blend modes, etc. I am sure that many would be interested. Photoshop is great, don't get me wrong, but it is shoehorned into being a web development tool. It isn't by nature. Fireworks and tools like it were never well rounded enough. Now we're in an era where CSS can actually do a lot of the stuff Photoshop is capable of.

Can't wait to try this out.

colemanti• 14 years ago

How much is it going to cost? :P

CSS Hat translates Photoshop layer styles to CSS3

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