One thing I’m realizing is that, contrary to the normal progression of comps in which an interface might be drafted first in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator and then fleshed out in Adobe Photoshop, the ideal for production purposes is to complete the artwork in Illustrator. It’s so much easier to create sophisticated, gradient-intensive designs in Photoshop, of course, but when the interface is ultimately destined to be expressed in a Macromedia Flash movie, it makes sense to work with vectors. For one thing, it makes scaling the widgets so much easier, and for another, it significantly improves the speed of the Flash movie. This is kind of like a no-brainer that I should’ve have realized before, but it was so much less painful to do this work in pixels that I too conveniently ignored it. So, while I’ve more or less started to get the hang of working like this in Photoshop, I’m going to have to learn how to do it all over again with Illustrator.
+Sliders and Buttons, Oh My
Right: Click me! No, slide me! Widgets, Aqua style.