Wireframes Magazine » Annotation Droplets

Annotation Droplets

January 30th, 2009

This little design documentation pattern has been with us for a long time and yet it’s still worthy of mentioning. The idea of annotating wireframes using droplets or circles with one pointy edge is a nice visual technique. The coloured circle is what grabs the attention quite well, combined with the pointed edge that allows to reference a very specific area. Will Evans allowed me to post this sample and he also has an interesting write up on his wireframing process. Finally there is also a Konigi Omnigraffle Stencil which uses these droplets as well. I’d also be very much interested to see what others are doing in terms of annotation. If you have interesting visuals, please send those samples over! :)

Credits: Will Evans

Tags: annotation, colour, wireframe
Posted in Samples | 13 Comments »

13 Comments:

Alex on January 30, 2009 at 10:07 am said:

Very nice annotation to the wireframe! I usually use the 'sticky note' symbol in Axure (as seen <a href="http://www.whatwasithinking.co.uk/2008/04/12/on-info…target=”_blank”>here or the notes box in iRise.
Alex on January 30, 2009 at 10:19 am said:

Sorry, link was: <a href="http://www.whatwasithinking.co.uk/2008/04/12/on-informat…target=”_blank”>http://www.whatwasithinking.co.uk/2008/04/12/on-i…
Jakub Linowski on January 30, 2009 at 6:26 am said:

Hi Alex. This bad link must be an IntenseDebate bug. I let them know about this, and hopefully they can fix this.
davidmead on January 30, 2009 at 1:44 pm said:

I find these a great tool in Visio. I grabbed Garrett Dimon's templates and they have a great annotaion shape [ http://v1.garrettdimon.com/resources/templates-st...].
Rob Fay on January 30, 2009 at 2:23 pm said:

<a href="http://www.greenonions.com”target=”_blank”>Dan Brown showed Visio users how to create their own on <a href="http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/wireframe_annotatio…target=”_blank”>Boxes and Arrows.
Rob Fay on January 30, 2009 at 2:24 pm said:

Uggh…sorry…comments not accepting markup. Dan Brown (www.greenonions.com)showed Boxes and Arrows readers how to create their own using Visio: www.boxesandarrows.com/view/wireframe_annotations…
juarezpaf on February 1, 2009 at 6:42 am said:

That's a great tip! But I think if you don't care about these annotations you can compromise the understand of your wireframes.
I'm learning a lot with this Mag. Thanks a lot guys!
davidmead on February 3, 2009 at 4:29 pm said:

Garrett's annotation shape is built off of Dan's article.
Michael Koenig on February 11, 2009 at 4:54 am said:

Testing. Please ignore.
ericscheid on February 16, 2009 at 4:55 am said:

I trialled the droplet style on a couple of projects and found it a bit fiddly – in the end I just used single text objects and set the background colour to contrast with the wireframe and used a round-cornered fat stroke which matched the background – it looks like a circle object with a text object positioned/grouped, but much easier to handle.

In a recent project I went even more minimal, using a solid dot with a line connecting to the relevant note. The dot was a good 2 or 3 times thicker than the wireframe lines, so they stood out without drawing a lot of attention. The advantage to using this method is I don't need to worry about skipping/doubling up on note numbers as I remove/add annotations.

I'll scrub the client details and submit soon.
Jason Grant on June 12, 2009 at 2:16 pm said:

I have seen this done in many different ways.

I am edging to prefer annotated prototype in real HTML/CSS with overlayed annotations which are based on JavaScript.
aaddad on September 2, 2010 at 4:53 am said:

I have seen this done in many different ways.