April 7th, 2009 by Jeff Hipp

The Value of a Designer’s Cheat Sheet

About this post:

A timesaving Photoshop tip from Jeff Hipp, one of our Senior Designers.

Filed under Productivity, Tips, Tricks & Hints

Cheat sheets can be your best friend and daily ally. No, I'm not talking about that small piece of paper or notes on the palm of your hand that you used in Ninth grade Spanish class on test day. I'm talking about the use of a cheat sheet in Photoshop.

There are items, shapes or icons that you favor and use often in your web designs. You have your own style, a style your company uses, or simply things you know clients love to see. I can't recall the hours I've spent trying to remember which past client comp was the one that I made that had the cool flare or used a specific video icon. Even remembering some comp a colleague created that had a nice way to treat a submit button when that person is on vacation. Sure, you could search the web for rights-free stuff – but you don't want, or have time, to recreate the items, especially since you already did that once before. Here's a quick solution… make a Photoshop cheat sheet.

Start out with a new blank photoshop file – say, 800×800 at 72dpi (for web). Then simply start pulling elements from your past designs into the document, and be sure they are all on separate layers – named appropriately. Be sure that these are things you created and have the rights to use. Include video player scrubber bars, button styles, scroll bars, arrows, pulldowns, form elements, and even common tool elements such as Adobe PDF, twitter, youtube or podcast logos.

You can expand the canvas size as you run out of room. Keep the file in a handy place. This will prove a great speed tool for you when creating designs for that next new client or when you find yourself "needing" to make another website comp before noon.