Since wireframing is the elementary level of design process, it’s easy for anyone to create wireframes. People use different ways to create wireframes. It’s up to you what you want to choose.

Pencil & paper

Pencil and paper is not limited to sketching only. It’s the most handy thing! You don’t need a software, computer, and not even electricity. You can sit wherever you want and start giving our design ideas a shape. This is the cheapest and least time consuming technique of wireframing.

Microsoft PowerPoint

A wireframe created in PowerPoint

Source: tatvic.com

The ease of using PowerPoint makes it a great tool and animation, drawing and even design. With readily available auto shapes and drawing tools, it’s so fast to create wireframes that make sense to the designer.

Professional tools

After realizing the importance of wireframes in the design process, there are plenty of tools available that can be used to create wireframes in no time. These tools can come free and even cost you hundreds of dollars, depending up on your need and frequency of using them. Here’s a list of these tools:

• Axure RP
• Omnigraffle
• Invision app
• Mocking bird
• Mockflow
• Pencil project
• Cacoo
• Picodo
• Adobe Fireworks

Pencil

Screenshot of Pencil

Source: tatvic.com

I will talk in detail about some of the tools in another blog post. But here’s one tool which I can’t stop mentioning about. The pencil project. It’s the most favorite in the industry and comes at no cost. Pencil is an add-in from Firefox and also comes as standalone app for Windows, Mac and Linux. It offers features which some of the paid tools even don’t offer. It not only has an extensive list of auto shapes, but lot more other features like GUI (GUI = graphical user interface) elements, widgets like scroll bars, sliders, progress bars, multiple pages within one document, and also interlinking of pages for real simulation of interactivity. You can even align page elements to be pixel perfect, which will save the designer’s time. Use Pencil. It’s as easy as drawing on paper.

People use different ways for creating wireframes, based on their comfort level. It can be any way you choose, what’s important is to get the design right before it actually starts. It should save iterations, resources, a lot of time and at the end, money.

Source / read more: tatvic.com