Like most designers, I do my design comps (prototypes) in Photoshop. And also like most designers, I’m a typophile and am obsessed with the best looking type I can achieve in my designs. After all these years, I do believe the one thing that irks me most about Photoshop is the way it renders text — the four different anti-aliasing settings suck because I’m spoiled by the Mac OS X Cocoa text rendering engine which makes text look 10x better.
Because Photoshop anti-aliasing makes me puke, I do all of my type-setting for design prototypes in Apple TextEdit, which uses Cocoa anti-aliasing to make text look amazing. By doing this I keep an .rtf
file alongside the PSD design in my folder. To transfer the text from TextEdit to the Photoshop file, I just take a selection screenshot (Apple + Control + Shift + 4 ….. then select a box around what you want) and then paste it into the PSD.
When I’m ready to write the CSS for the design, I just open up the text file and check out the font settings (family, size, etc.) and get to crackin’. Here’s how my text file currently looks for the new 9rules homepage coming this week:
Nothing revolutionary here, just wanted to write about the little quirky things I’ve learned to do in the past few years. If you’re on Mac OS X and hate Photoshop’s anti-aliasing, maybe give TextEdit a shot — it’ll make your prototypes look much better.