They also use website wireframes to verify they are including the right branding and navigation. Creating a website wireframe is easy with Gliffy's free wireframe. Create a responsive HTML wireframe. Since the early days of 3. D computer modelling, modellers have used a 'wireframe' view of an object to show an object in three dimensions with minimal computer processor cost. Early video games like Battlezone and Tempest showed 3. D objects as wireframes because early home computers weren't powerful enough to fully render 3. Wireframes are sketches, drawn by hand or using a computer program, that show the features, content, and functionality of a website or software application. Wireframes and mockups gives a good idea about the design in early stages of design process and understanding the difference between two is important. Create a responsive HTML wireframe. By Creative Bloq Staff. You can create wireframes in many ways and by using many tools. We have a list of 10 Best Wireframe Tools For Web Designers. Edraw can be used as an easy wireframe software for simple wireframes or working wireframe prototype. You can easily create wireframes for any websites. The Lumzy team is proud to offer some of the best prototyping, mockup and wireframe tools in the market. Balsamiq Mockups is a rapid wireframing tool that helps you Work Faster & Smarter. Sketch-style wireframes help focus the conversation on content and interaction. Lucidchart’s wireframe and mockup tools make it easy to design, share, and test your ideas, so you can pick out the winners early on. D objects (and early one colour displays couldn't show them even if they could). Years later, software designers and developers began referring to their sketches of what they were planning to build as wireframes as well. They were trying to accomplish the same thing the 3. D modellers were: to show ideas in a low- cost way. They wanted to provide non- designers and developers with a multi- dimensional understanding of what they were designing. As the web moved from being rich text documents to being interfaces designed like software, web designers began wireframing as well (although some in the industry are questioning whether it's now time to ditch wireframes). For years, I've described my basic philosophy for wireframing using two adjectives: cheap and ugly. Wireframes should be something that you can produce quickly, and you should be able to radically change content, components, priority and layouts with little cost. Wireframes should also be as devoid of style as possible. The last thing you want clients focusing on when reviewing wireframes is the colour palette, textures, typography and imagery. If that's happening, your wireframes aren't ugly enough, or at least not low- fi enough. Wireframes aren't for testing style; they're for testing your content model, architecture, hierarchy and flows. Consider something like style tiles instead if you're looking to test or establish a visual or style language with your client. Because they were intended as an inexpensive idea- testing tool, for years, wireframes were simply pencil sketches on paper with quickly rendered boxes and squiggly lines. Eventually some of us found we could make them even faster with the copy- and- paste abilities computers afford, so we began using tools like Omni. Graffle or Adobe Fireworks to speed things up even more. Nevertheless, wireframes remained grey boxes and copied- andpasted bits of text placed on a fixed canvas. They were low- fidelity sketches of what a website would be. You need to specify a separate grid width for large screens. As website interactions became more and more complex with the advent of Web 2. Ajax, as well as advancements in HTML and CSS, there was often a lack of clarity or even a degree of confusion created by these sketches of websites. Annotations to the rescue! Producing annotated sketches of our websites made a lot of sense as long as the websites themselves were also displayed at a single size on a fixed canvas. Brave new world. We've now entered a brave new world where our websites live on a plethora of devices of various screen sizes, resolutions and interaction patterns. The fixed canvas is a thing of the past. So, what's our solution been? For the most part, we choose two to three screen sizes (which typically map to Apple's original two i. OS devices and one random desktop size) and repeat the process for each. Sketch everything, annotate everything, profit! Assuming we learn a little from whichever size we start at, we should sometimes be able to do this in less than three times the amount of time as our old wireframes for just desktop devices, right? In my experience, annotations and confusion increase with this approach. We also begin spending time creating documents that try to make sense of all the screen sizes and presenting these sketches of our website at different sizes in a way that's easy for clients to understand and digest. Without a set width, the large screen will inherit the small grid width. Aside from the fact that we've at least doubled our time investment in wireframing, we've also likely ignored a number of key decisions that will have to be made at some point. At times we even paint ourselves into a corner that's very difficult to develop our way out of with HTML and CSS. If our two end points are 3. This is, after all, where we get the term 'breakpoint' from. There's an additional cost to wireframing this way, even if we think we can get our three widths wireframed more quickly than other methods. Enter the responsive HTML wireframe. Many designers have been afraid or unwilling to make the leap to producing responsive HTML wireframes for various reasons. What follows is a short list of some of the most common things I've heard designers say about this, and some thoughts on each. These are each very valid questions and sensible concerns, so I'll respond to each individually. I may not be able to convince you to try something new, but hopefully I can dispel a few misconceptions about what I mean when I say that one of my new deliverables in my design process is responsive HTML wireframes. However, it may well reduce additional communication and work after your wireframes are approved, since static wireframes often leave a lot of stones unturned. Additionally, as you begin wireframing for an ever- increasing number of screen sizes and interaction types, you'll likely find the need for either more wireframes, or additional annotation, which can quickly get out of hand. Maximising speed isn't the only goal in wireframing. To create layout and design ideas I need a canvas- based tool. Though my client deliverable has become responsive HTML wireframes, I still sketch as a part of my process, and I think you often should. I don't have time to fight with media queries and build responsive screens. There are a number of frameworks out there that provide handy, reusable code so you can begin piecing together components and layouts that suit your ideas and sketches. Small and large will both be centred unless using the uncentred class. Enter the framework. Now, assuming I've convinced you to wet your toes in the HTML wireframing waters on your next project, let's talk about frameworks. Frameworks generally offer a built- in grid system, base styles, and pre- made, reusable components (navigation, slideshows, and so on). They also offer a community of helpful people due to their widespread use, documentation, and they've been pre- tested in various browsers. There are several frameworks out there, each with their pros and cons. Here's a list of just a few: I've chosen Foundation to provide you with a quick walkthrough for creating a responsive HTML wireframe because it's popular, it's mobile- first, it's optionally semantic (meaning you can concern your class- based assignments to being semantic using Sass), it has lots of pre- made templates and components, and it's under active development. Basically, it's one of the simplest frameworks to get your head around that also could be used to turn your wireframes into an end product. The size- offset- x class lets you choose the number of grid columns to offset. Getting started with Foundation. To create your first wireframe using Foundation you can simply go to http: //foundation. You'll arrive at a page that provides an array of options to custom tailor your package, but for the purpose of this example we'll just click the Download Foundation CSS link and away we go. The other useful links are Foundation's documentation page and templates page for ready- made samples you can reuse in your wireframes. Once the ZIP file has downloaded, unzip it into whatever folder on your system you want to store your wireframes in, and then retitle the folder to something meaningful, for example, acme- project. When you open the folder, inside you should see a help. CSS, images and Java. Script. Open the index. You can simply delete all the sample content within the body tags. This will give you your basic page structure you need ready to go. The important things to note if you're making your own . Add the normalize. It's a 1. 2- column grid, is completely nestable and fluid, and you can work really fast by assigning grid widths by simply adding a class to an item (for example, class=. For example, on a small screen, small- x columns or on a large screen, large- x columns. You can create a new instance of the grid by using the row class on a wrapper element. So, in the example below, we have an element that should span the full width on small screens, and only half of the width on large screens.< div class=. This would be accomplished as follows: < div class=. If you only assign a small width, the large screen size will simply maintain or inherit the small assignment. In the example below, the element would have a width of eight columns on both small and large screen sizes.< div class=. In the following example the element would span the full width on small screens, but on large screens it would span 1. On large screens, it would span the width of nine columns but be centered.< div class=. Our wireframe shows a navigation menu at the top of the screen that contains the site name and shows a simple menu link on small screens. Thankfully, there's a pre- baked navigation component that matches that description in Foundation. Below is an example of how to achieve this. At the top of our body, we'll add the following.< nav class=. This ul will contain our list items with menu links. The full menu across the top of large screens has the site name on the left. Creating our block grid. Our wireframe sketch then shows a grid view of portfolio items that is two items wide on small screens and three items wide on large. Foundation makes block grids like this quite simple by providing a pre- baked small- block- grid- x and large- block- grid- x class that can be used on any ul element. To produce our block grid list of portfolio items we'll use the following markup.< div class=. We do this so that the block grid doesn't stretch all the way to the edge of the screen, but rather maintains the same padding and max- width as the rest of our items defined within our grid.
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