More Templates for Everyone

Mobile continues to march along, evolve and grow. Since I posted this design template last year I have built quite a few other design elements.

But mostly spread out among a variety of other documents, or for specific projects. So, last week I got them all together and after input from the rest of the team here, I have an all new document for everyone:

These files are updated irregularly, and instead of always warranting a blog post, will always be placed on the Drawing Tools & Templates page in the D4M Wiki, along with lots of links to other's templates, and tips for using whatever design tool strikes our fancy. Big changes will probably be posted to the Twitter account, so subscribe to that if you'd like.

• Original document, still in Macromedia Freehand MX 2008 (.fh11) zipped up, 1.1 mb
• PDF for viewing, or opening in Adobe Illustrator, et. al., 744 kb
• Most of these items, as Adobe In-Design CS3 libraries, 5.4mb zipped up.

There are little elements of all sorts thrown all over the now four page document, but a couple of the more interesting ones are:

All the vector phones that we use internally. The best, shiniest iPhone I drew myself, as I was unexcited about any others I'd seen.

As a follow up to the gesture research we've done here, I have started making iconic, inter-frame gesture graphics to match that language. These will clearly be expanded as we execute more work.

The more I work with the team here the more I become convinced that documentation styles are key to communicating well, and that they have to meet the design process you use. So, if you download this document either make sure that the elements you borrow meet your needs, or read this blog and my design process book and just borrow our process as well.

One more point about mobile design process: It's mobile. While the process book I just mentioned is pretty generalized, the templates, and increasingly some of our documentation styles (stay tuned for an all new diagram style in the next few months) are getting fairly mobile specific. If you are reading this, I'll assume you are a mobile designer. I want to remind everyone to notice that most cool, new design tools seem to be about desktop web these days; make sure that whatever diagramming style and design artifacts you use are appropriate and serve your process well.

As an anonymous EileenB pointed out through the contact form, there was a tiny bug in the zoom-in, zoom-out gestures. Links now point to minorly updated versions. Please go ahead and comment here if you find a bug, want to ask for more formats, or anything else.

And, if you can convert it yourself to a different format (like Omni Graffle) that you like to use, either get it back to me or tell me how, and I’ll post it as well.

If anyone is confused or annoyed by the PDF version, please don’t be. It is not just for viewing, but can be opened in Illustrator, Photoshop and so on. I can be persuaded to make an Illustrator (CS3) package if you need, so just ask.

In other news, around a quarter of the (many) downloads so far are the Freehand version. So many I cannot believe it’s just folks accidentally clicking the wrong one. So, everyone remember that when saying old software is pointless, or trying to decide what to support with your open-source project, etc. Five years “out of date” and still going.

That said, I’m spending the afternoon drawing my latest project in InDesign.

thanks a lot for sharing!

Thanks for the gesture graphics! I look forward to seeing the new mobile diagram stencils.

I tried to download the FH file but it just opened up a browser window filled with code. Would prefer it over the pdf, if you are willing to fix that. Also tried to right-click the link and save linked file to desktop, ended up with a text file full of code.
thanks.

Huh. It has gotten odd on me. Didn’t do that when I first loaded it. The usual trickery did work, just download and then change the extension to .fh11. But I’ll change the freehand download link above to a zip file instead to keep it safe.

For those of you giving up and going to In Design, I’m also periodically hard at work on a library file of almost everything in these documents. When done, that’ll be posted as well. Thanks to Cinnamon Melchor at AKQA for showing me how useful libraries are in INDD these days, and sending me a sample gesture library file.