Comment by alabut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alabut | Hacker News Reader

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Nice! I like sketching so much that I devoted a big part of my portfolio to talking about my prototyping process:

http://alabut.com/work.html

Pro tip: buy a sketchbook that has both a 24 column grid and browser chrome, so it'll feel more like the final product and give you a better sense of proportion. But don't be afraid to chuck it for something even more low fidelity, like butcher paper and sharpies.

Here's the one I've been using - it has tear-away pages and alternates between full-width and 2-on-a-page layouts:

http://appsketchbook.com/products/ux-sketchbook

Best $12 I ever spent. I also a fan of the double-ended art markers by Prismacolor - they're basically like highlighters but in a variety of colors, like a subtle gray. I like adding shading with those instead of dealing with the messiness of pencils and erasers. That's how I make sketches like these:

http://dribbble.com/shots/230767-Stats-Page-For-iOS-App

http://dribbble.com/shots/230717-Dev-Dashboard

That UX Sketchbook looks neat, but I wonder why no landscape orientation. Most people I know have the browser maximised and there are still a lot of laptops and desktops out there.

The limiting factor is reading habits, not browser size. Just because you can design in a landscape orientation doesn't mean you should and wider isn't necessarily better. It's not like magazines are 3 feet across because paper's cheap, right?

I wholly agree (and ended up buying a tablet precisely because I got sick of reading blogs with vast swathes of empty space at the side), but not everything is necessarily better in portrait. I was going to forward the sketchbook link to Mrs Browl, who is redesigning the UX for her firm's browser-based product right now, but then I reflected that that application involves a lot of tabular data and records management and that many uses of the product in a portrait orientation would be terribly frustrating. She is interested in bringing it to tablets, and portrait orientation would be appropriate for many use cases, but not all.

I do think the UX sketchbook is very neat - the squared paper inside the broswer frame is genius. It just seems perverse to only offer a single orientation in 2 different sizes. If it had portrait on one side and landscape on the other I'd buy it in a second (he hinted, in case the makers are reading).

That's a fair point - just because the portrait orientation works for most sites doesn't mean it works for all sites.

So have I got a tip for you, friend. In case your wife hasn't found the right paper for her project yet, the best thing I can think of is to get a giant 11"x17" pad of Edward Tufte's grid paper. Scroll to the bottom of his shop page here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters

Not only is it large and easily usable in landscape mode, it uses what he calls a "ghost grid", where the grid is printed with a barely noticeable light ink so that it's visually less dominant and it fades into the background compared to the ink drawings you make on top of it.

I used nothing but Tufte's paper for years and was deliriously happy with it. It was so big that I could use it for all kinds of stuff, whether site flows or detailed UIs, whatever. The only reason I switched away is that not every project needed that much real estate and it's not the easiest thing to carry around. It's like having to tote around a whiteboard.

If she wants something smaller and more portable, there's the dot grid book by Behance:

http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/product/34/dot-grid-book

Hope that helps...

Wow - thanks for those links. I shall be adding a dot grid book to the gift list.

I would justify that by pointing out that web pages tend to scroll vertically; even (especially?) in landscape aspect, the rendered page is usually taller than it is wide.

If you really need to just design the first screenful of a page in landscape orientation, then go ahead and draw a big horizontal line through the centre of the page -- label it "FOLD" if it helps, and just work on that screen.

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