b.cognosco

Denim Site Sketching: Free-form Web Design

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:21:33 GMT

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new site design for a client – InterviewRX.com. We actually have the structure and information architecture pretty well mapped out and are focusing on look and feel, but this type of tool could still come in handy. Even though I am not a designer I’ve taken to creating my own mockups over the years because I find starting from ground zero with a designer to be incredibly frustrating and expensive – it just takes forever for a designer, even a good one, to figure out what you want if you can’t draw at least a basic picture of it yourself. So now I create a fairly complete mockup and then have a designer polish it. That works out much better for me.

But even though I’m getting better at it, I still go through lots of iterations – especially in basic information architecture. Something like Denim could come in handy. I like the mindmap-style sketch interface – seems to me the two are quite similar. I’ll be trying it out later this week. Hat tip to Jim McGee:

Web Design Tool: Denim Site Sketching

When you are making websites, inevitably some form of sketching will be done to rough out it’s design and interactivity.

Whether you’re the web designer or someone trying to communicate your ideas to a web designer, this little piece of software, called Denim, will come in handy.

What Denim does is allow you to create a mock website, with linking pages, just from your rough sketches. Obviously, this will work particularly well with a tablet interface.

Supports Windows, Mac and Unix.

Denim by the University Of Washington

MindManager 6 for Mac

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 31 May 2006 22:12:39 GMT

Mindjet have released MindManager 6 for Mac. This is a big deal. MindManager, long the leading mindmapping software tool, has been a strictly windoze affair from the beginning. And while there have been some mindmapping apps on Mac OS, none has really equaled MindManager, particularly with the dynamic ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and templates that handle project management, Getting Things Done, and all manner of specialized purposes. According to Mindjet's whitepaper on the new release, version 6 for Mac files can be moved back-and-forth between windoze and Mac OS systems.

Knowledge Capture Mindmap

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 02 May 2003 03:53:22 GMT

Matt Mower has created an excellent visual summary of the key elements in knowledge capture. Contrary to a lot of what's written in the mindmap literature, creating a good mindmap is not easy. Condensing thoughts to a single keyword or two, aligning them into patterns that add context, and keeping it clean are much more difficult in practice than in theory.

Nice job, Matt.

Thinking about capturing knowledge.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]