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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

I never thought of using KeyNote to design a UI. I always thought designers use Photoshop or InDesign for that purpose.

Is KeyNote used just for the ease of use, or is there some other requirement that the Adobe products don't measure up to?

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I'm a big fan of OmniGraffle for this purpose. A lot of the same arrangement snaps and all, and it's extremely simple to create primitives and text and whatnot.

Illustrator is awesome. Also, pencil and a piece of paper. Sometimes I create physical models of complex UI objects if I need to grasp their animations/behavior. Some designers I knew liked Balsamiq, or Blend, but everyone knows how to draw on paper.

It would be harder to design in Photoshop, methinks, since when designing you're dealing with abstract shapes and lines (vector) not raw pixels (raster). I mean sometimes you do :) I created and prototyped this cool video-preview control entirely in Paint.NET, literally changing pixels to create gradients.

I used PowerPoint for prototyping UIs and designs for HTML letters. It's quite handy tool for the task. The nice thing is that you can just throw shapes onto a slide and then when you run the slideshow, you get a full-screen version of your graphics, cropped to the slide boundaries. Simplifies a lot of stuff for me.

Keynote is really nice for mockups. It has more than capable drawing tools and the snapping is excellent. It's major benefit over a Photoshop or Illustrator would be its relative simplicity. With mockups that is a big factor. Less complexity in the tool can mean less opportunity to add complexity in your design.

Not only drawing, but as the author suggests, sequence. Keynote makes it trivial to play and reorder the deck to try how things could flow from view to view. Quite harder with PS or AI.

There are no rules for what to create your UI in.

I have used everything from Keynote to PowerPoint, to Photoshop, to illustrator, to indesign to FireWorks and a number of other applications.

KeyNote is fairly good as long as we are talking overarching UI

A good friend of mine has been a lead designer at a number of big companies and he also uses Keynote to mockup UIs. For $20 it's not much of a risk to try it.

I like Fireworks much better than Photoshop for mocking up web or mobile UI too.

i use inkscape or open office's presentation tool all the time... or sometimes scripts that make svg files depending on what it is, or hell notecards and a pen! :P

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