

Adobe has announced "Photoshop Design Space," a new interface for Photoshop geared toward professional app and Web designers. The company calls the new interface "a companion experience" to the normal Photoshop UI, which is a streamlined interface consisting of the most-needed tools for app and Web design. The most interesting thing, though? Adobe designed this new interface in HTML5, and it's open source.

On the Design Space page, Adobe describes its reasoning: "Built with HTML5, Design Space enables our team to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate, while still remaining deeply integrated with the speed and reliability of Photoshop." Adobe maintains a GitHub page for the project where anyone can fork the Photoshop interface and make their own.

Design Space features art boards with presets for the most common screen sizes, with sizes like "iPhone 6," "Android 1080p," and "Microsoft Surface 3." Selection is much easier; just double-clicking on an item on the canvas will drill down into the layers. Double-clicking on text will switch to the text tool, and double-clicking on a path will switch to the path tool. Two items can be selected and have their positions swapped with a button press, so it's easy to quickly rearrange a UI mockup. Text input for attributes is smarter, too. Color values can take RGB, Hex, or CSS-defined colors, and all the numeric fields can understand math operators.

Adobe says the project is a "technology preview release," and the HTML5 interface architecture is an "experiment." For now, it is limited to the Design Space interface, but could you imagine if the whole Photoshop interface were written in HTML5 and fully customizable? It would make a powerful image editor even more flexible and able to bend to its users' needs.

Design Space can be enabled in the options panel of the latest Adobe Photoshop CC release.