
Whats your favorite tool for creating a wireframe interface sketch? - wammin

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bsaunder
Denim (<http://dub.washington.edu/denim/)> is kind of interesting. It's a Java
Application with an "interesting" UI (seems a bit ironic). It's probably worth
a few minutes of downloading and checking out to see if it suits your style.

Personally (and I'm more of developer than a designer), I'm with wammin,
pencil paper or many white board sessions are where I start for the first few
dozen iterations. The last thing I want is yet another tool to get in my way,
providing more complexity than value. Once things settle down, or if you have
to work with off-site people, electronic versions make a lot of sense.

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jamesbritt
Denim rocks. Paper & pencil rule, but Denim makes it easy to get a working
mock-up up and running.

After drawing out the pages, you can create active links among them, and
export the site to HTML. Denim creates pages that have nothing more than image
maps, with hot spots for linking and navigating around the site.

This is something you can run in browser and put in front of clients to verify
general behavior and layout.

Plus I like how you can zoom in and out to see a site map or a single page or
some detail in a form on page.

Note: Denim works best with a drawing tablet, such as what Wacom sells. But a
mouse will work as well; the gestures, though, may be harder to execute.

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brianmckenzie
I use InkScape for wireframes. It saves everything as SVG so the files are
easy to send to people I'm collaborating with, and they can open in
Illustrator if that's what they're using.

<http://inkscape.org>

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wammin
Sweet, thanks for the tip. I just installed inkscape and it looks awesome. I
have been looking for a good drawing tool for linux, this might be it. Can't
believe I never heard of it before!

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nickb
OmniGraffle <http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/> \+ free web
templates from here: <http://graffletopia.com/>

It's an excellent way to get stuff done. OG and templates have saved us a ton
of production time and wireframes that we creted were very clean and most
importantly, they were clear and anyone who looked at them would know how
stuff worked and how things were connected. OG allows you to add the right
amount of detail without wasting a ton of time on minutia that creeps up if
you use PS.

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wammin
Before I design a web interface, I usually like to sketch it out to organize
my ideas. I'm still using good-old graph paper and a mechanical pencil, then
will often scan my sketches to post on our internal wiki. Are there better
tools out there that would maybe allow for sharing & collaboration?

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abstractbill
I don't wireframe. I get an ugly-but-working _real_ interface working and wait
for people to complain.

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walesmd
Pencil and paper

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phil
+1. Anything will do, but a pigma Micron pen and a stack of 11x17 paper are
optimal. The paper gives you enough room to draw several ideas on a page but
fits on a desk or table. The pen makes a clean, fine line that approximates
1px black on a screen, but lets you scribble quickly.

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cwilbur
Pencil and paper to rough out ideas and proportions, and then HTML and CSS.

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felipe
Here is a related post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11777>

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awt
Voodoopad. It's a sort of like a text editor, but it's a wiki.

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zaidf
photoshop

