Fellow mN designer Adam Palmer pointed me in the direction of Denim - a very cool sketch based tool for early prototyping of websites. Version 1.1 has just been released which is great as 1.0 was a bit dodgy on OSX. It really is a cool idea - just sketch out some pages then link them together just by drawing lines from one thing to another. Brilliant for getting your first stage ideas down, testing interfaces, site walk throughs etc. To see an actual exported Denim site, I’ve created a little scamp of the McGoogle project.
Versatile Denim
Comments
I totally agree that pen and paper is great and something that I use everyday for it’s immediacy but the thing with Denim is that you do quick pen and paper type stuff that you can whack on a website for approval of a basic idea. And the clients we work with actually like sketched out ideas (we’ve done stuff like this for years) - the reason it’s good is that the client doesn’t think it’s the end product and they don’t get siidetracked looking at fonts, colours etc. I also know of a backend firm that use Denim to show basic functionality walkthru’s etc.
Bren / 13/06/2003i’d be scared about having to explain “its just a functionality walkthrough” to them constantly.
i guess I’ve just worked with some totally un-imaginative people haha
13twelve / 13/06/2003I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Looks good.
My clients always focus on unimportant detail when I show them some basic design I’ve done in flash or DW.
this will save me lots of scanning!
James / 25/06/2003
I remember reading about Denim on Metafilter a few weeks ago.
Like then I’m sorta left thinking “whats wrong with a pencil and paper?”
For showing your basic idea to say fellow designer types or people experienced with what you do; then pen and paper style stuff like the denim stuff is ok. But why use the computer to do what you can do in a min on paper?
For showing clients, they’re not gonna get enough from hand sketch stuff like the denim stuff, cos to them its gonna look rank (like a 5 year old just drew it)
i must be missing something, cos meta filter also thought it was cool.
13twelve / 12/06/2003(hears you on the version 1 not being so good on osX - something which may well have put me off!)