“Can you do a mockup for me?”

“Can you do a template design for me?”

“Why can’t I click anything in this? What did you send me?”

If you’ve ever had the first two questions thrown at you as a web designer, it is quite possible you’ve also had the third question fired at you as well.

I read a post from Verne Ho at Creative Briefing a few weeks ago in relation to managing mockups. Depending on the client, and the delivery (am I delivering a strict skin/template in Photoshop or do I need to make up a html/css bundle), my preference has been to develop in Photoshop and like Verne, export as a high quality JPG for approval.

However, in more recent projects I’ve found myself skipping photoshop altogether and going straight to designing through html/css.

Verne posed the question “how do you manage mockups?”. I now manage mockups by going straight to the build. Particularly if I’m doing any Wordpress development work. It is becoming increasingly easier for me to progress through Wordpress template development and while it is nice to start out in Photoshop and look pretty in a bitmap environment I, much like my client, would rather see something working.

So rather than deliver a flattened JPG file dumped from Photoshop, I prefer to deliver some class of interactive template design - working links, browser-safe colours, web page look and feel. I find that it also gives the sense you’re getting value for your time or money when at an early stage you can get the grasp of how something actually looks as opposed to how something might look when rendered in a browser.

Does the more interactive you get mean your mockup is no longer a mockup? Was it every a mockup to begin with?

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