Exporting CSS from Photoshop
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Alright , in this video we're going to look at how to get something called the CSS out of your document . The web designer is going to say what colour is this,what sizes is this,what font is it ,whats the spacing between the lines. And you could go through with your type tool and write them all out and explain what they all are. A nice little helpful thing you can do to make it a little easier for them is to export the CSS.
Now lets say that they want to know what font this is and what font size it is . So what we can do with my curser I can find it in my , there he is WHO WE ARE ,Theres one in here that says copy CSS. If I copy CSS nothing seems to happen. Ok , what its done is its copied it to your clip board like you've gone to edit copy. Now you can open up any text editor ,word or chuck in an email and hit paste..And what its done is that its set.Its created this class along the top there,which we probably don't need and its got a lot of the important stuff like font size , font family ,font colour the font weight the line heights ,ok whether thats centred and this type of thing ok position ,left ,top . Send it to the developer anyway they'll probably going to ignore all this and if you are a web designer you'll just know what to pick out of this and what you don't need .
Now I could explain to my web developer that the Hero Heading text is this and they'll be able to use their magic web design skills to style their text to make it match exactly like your photoshop mock up. Ok so lets look at for doing some of the structured parts like this navigation box at the top.Cause what we need is maybe the height and we need what colour it is and what the alpha transparency is or the opacity is. So I'm going to select them as my nav bar , I'm going to go up to layer , I'm going to go to copy CSS and I'm going to jump into note pad and this is going to be my nav-bar and I'm going to hit paste. Theres bits that their going to use and bits that their not.If your not a web designer and you have know idea what this junk is , just send them the whole lot and they can pick through it. I know that we don't need the class and we'll use the back ground colour,we'll use the opacity but we don't need any of this. But we do need the height ok.So those are the things that I'm probably looking for as a web designer that I need to go and style to make sure its the same and it just takes a lot of the guess work out of me as a web developer to say ooh ,its about that high and ooh its about that transparency and to send it back to you as the designer for you to come back and say,hey its not the right one and lots of two ing and fro ing. This will help remove a lot of that.
And thats one of the nice new features in photoshop CC. If your using CS6 or CS5 , unfortunately its not a feature for you .Your going to have to do a lot more of the two-ing and fro-ing and typing out and explaining what the font is,what the font size is.what colour it is what the opacity is and labelling that out for them. Or if they have some photoshop skills themselves they can go into it and do it
Alright thats exporting CSS from photoshop .