I love Shape layers in Photoshop. They make editing and changing design comps a breeze. Resizing, re-coloring, everything—they help us be more efficient. But, when it comes to slicing the file up for the web, there is one thing that I hate: when people don't use “Snap to Pixels” with their shapes. Let me help you not make me really annoyed.

Why is snapping to pixels with shape layers important?

For website design, snapping to pixels is imperative. The web is still a pixel-based medium, and will be for years. Because of this, it's not possible to define images, shapes, layers, or text at a non-whole-number pixel measurement. Not only that, but we can't even save images with a width or height that are not whole numbers. So, precision in your design mockups is just as important as precision in your site.

How to Turn Snapping On

Select the Shape tool from the tools palette. Your top menu bar will now have a bunch of shape options. Select the rectangle or rounded rectangle shape. Click the drop-down arrow to the right of the shape selector buttons. In the bottom-right of this pane, check the box that says “Snap to Pixels”

Use this and I will heart you forever.

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It’s been just a half of a week since I relaunched Paul Armstrong Designs; I’m happy to say that it has received quite a warm reception amongst the webernet crowd. I guess that all of those late-nights that I spent working on it will pay off.

Share your thoughts on “Post v6 Relaunch Updates”.

The Web is evolving, and with all of the transitions in my personal and professional life in the last year, I feel like my site fell behind during the version 5 run. There were actually two iterations of v5: v5.0 and v5.7. Yeah… I skipped around a bit.

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Downtime when a client is trying to reference my site is completely unacceptable. Downtime in the middle of the working day is completely unacceptable. Even scheduled downtime for upgrades as often as you have it is still unacceptable. More than a four-hour response time for support requests is unacceptable.

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I’m not generally one for vocalizing my personal yearly resolutions, but since one of them is to blog more, I’m going to share a few resolutions that will impact me professionally and publicly. So, here are a few:

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