Last week we reviewed About Muse and its promise of full cycle design and development. Today, we are looking at Edge Reflow, which we think is a much better candidate for integration into workflow process by designers and developers alike when designing responsive sites.
We liked the ability to create multiple responsive designs in a single file, which would eliminate the need for separate set of Photoshop files for every breakpoint. We also liked synchronization between Edge Reflow and Photoshop; once you are finalizing designs in Edge Reflow, those changes can be synched back with original PSD. We really liked getting individual elements’ code for multiple screen breakpoints all at once, which is a big time saver. We really liked file naming for saved images matching layer names from Photoshop.
The minor drawback of Edge Reflow is the additional few minutes of work it will take for designers to give all Photoshop layers unique and meaningful names that will be used in saved CSS. Apart from that, Edge Reflow is a really solid tool for responsive design and development. It will not be used to create entire sites with optimized and SEO-compliant code but it does streamline creative workflow and collaboration with developers on responsive sites.
Coming up next - why can’t we all just use InDesign and be done with it, it exports tons of HTML and CSS - right?