Windows 8 Templates has recently gone live as the new operating system is just around the corner. The site features a number of Metro UI themed kits and templates for PowerPoint users. The most comprehensive grouping (Windows 8 All-in-One Bundle Pro) contains a wireframing kit, a prototyping kit, an icon pack and storyboarding shapes (requires Visual Studio 2012). The main difference between the prototyping and wireframing kits is that the former has a bit more color. All of the work within each kit is also vector based and so makes it easier to edit and stretch the assets appropriately as needed. So if using a low barrier to entry tool such as PPT is important in your process, then give this template kit a try.

A couple of words on the use of PowerPoint by Jordan (the Author):

While I am adept in professional design tools like Photoshop, 99% of the time my tool of choice for mocking up an app is PowerPoint. PowerPoint is incredibly productive and simple, and yet powerful enough to help me develop even the most custom of designs quickly and efficiently. Better still is that everyone knows PowerPoint, and that means my clients can easily contribute to the design with their own edits and ideas. Another +1 from clients when they feel truly involved with the design of their product. It doesn’t stop at static mockups, I can use PowerPoint animations and slide transitions to turn any mockup into a functional prototype that clients can click through as though they were using a real app.

Credits: Jordan Gurrieri (Twitter)

Wirefy has been recently released by Christopher over at github. It’s a collection of functional responsive HTML snippets and templates which scale as you resize the browser (hence across devices). Hopefully beneficial to those who build HTML prototypes. Good work. Thanks a thousand for sharing.

From the website description:

Wirefy is a collection of CSS & JS files to help you rapidly experiment with responsive wireframes. Whether you keep them to yourself or use them to help educate your clients, Wirefy is flexible and here to help. Wirefy has been built from the ground up. Following the philosophy of mobile first, Wirefy will respond to the proper viewport. Go ahead, resize this page to see how it works. Wirefy is style agnostic so that clients don’t get hung up on colours, fonts, other design elements. It’s meant to be another tool for your development kit that provides the most basic styles as a foundation.

Credits: Chris Da Sie

Some time ago, Vincent released Minicons (after his Vectorian release) which I thought might be worth a mention for the UI folks out here. It’s a set of 1500 icons in many many different forms ranging from EPS, to Photoshop CSH, to PNG, PDF, Omnigraffle, Keynote and Powerpoint. The icon packs are sold in flexible plans ranging from 100, to 750 to the ultimate 1500 icon sets and priced accordingly. Cheers.

Credits: Vincent Le Moign

Sketchkit was recently shared as a freebie by Navjot. The kit is a wireframing Keynote template loaded with a bunch of UI elements. A nice alternative to the other growing templates out there. Thanks for sharing!

In his own words:

Wireframes are meant to explore the purpose and functionality of a product. Wireframes are not supposed to imitate the final user interface. In fact, laying too much importance on how the product will look while wireframing can be distracting for the researcher and misleading for the client.

Credits: Navjot Pawera

The Speech Bubble User Flow by Barnabas, is a hybrid representation that combines a sitemap, persona and user flow all into one. The idea starts off by overlaying simple and short comments made by a persona in the form speech bubbles on top of a structured sitemap. More so, the speech bubbles are ordered chronologically and so flow through one by one. In the built Axure Demo that has been generated, the sitemap pages are also linked to the wireframes which makes it easier to switch from the generic to the specific. Barnabas has been exploring Personas that “could talk” in a few other forms as well, as the Complex Speech Bubble Persona and the Commented Sitemaps show.

My take on this deliverable would be that Personas can sometimes get lost once a project builds momentum. Possibly what Barnabas is doing is helping the Persona to live a little bit longer and inspire the team a bit more as the Persona’s comments pop up throughout the project. One thing I do wonder about is how this would work though if there was a second or third scenario for the same user type, as sometimes I feel that interactive projects are composed of many little separate user stories and not just one. Either way, good stuff and thanks for sharing!

If you would like to tweak the deliverable, the author has been kind enough to share the actual source Axure file as a downloadable template.

Credits: Barnabas Nagy

From the maker of Keynotopia, now comes Axutopia. This is a wide collection of Axure widgets and icons that can be used for prototyping, wireframing and UI design purposes. The whole thing can be purchased as a bundle, or libraries are also broken up individually. Sets are available to style: iPhones, iPads, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Web 2.0, Facebook, Blackberries, Android, and Windows Phones. Here are the details:

• 3,000+ Axure widgets
• 100% Royalty-free icons
• Fully editable text labels
• Pixel-perfect PNG groups
• Preserved corners with transparency
• Comes in .rp and .rplib formats

Credits: Amir Khella

In addition to the 750 Vector Icons for Web Designers, Vincent has also released 930 Vintage Vector Ornaments as set. The set comes in both EPS and AI files and is filled with ornaments, borders, corners, rulers and flourishes. :) Possibly useful for some projects? The bundle comes at a price of $39. Enjoy.

Credits: Vincent Le Moign

Hannah just started the Fireworks Wireframing Kit resource site. It’s still hot of the press, but the blog is gearing up to be a collection of freely submitted PNG files submitted by the public to help with wireframing. So far there are a few grey scale files already with such components as: modal windows, login boxes, and buttons of various shapes and sizes. Right now you have to download each component individually, as you see fit. Hopefully it’s useful and please feel free to submit something if you have stuff to share.

Credits: Hannah Milan

PJ recently took another stab at making gesture icons more comprehensible and released Cue under Creative Commons. It’s a proposed system for representing gestures more clearly that makes use of thumb like icons. He explains his motivation for the project in a blog post as well. The icons come in PNG (4 sizes), SVG, Omnigraffle and InDesign formats. Awesome. It’s always great to see explorations in visual language. Thanks PJ!

Here is how he puts it:

These gesture icons act as roadsigns to an app for interaction way-finding. As expected, there has been a significant collection of gesture icon sets that have been made available to fill this need. The current crop of icons succeed in clarity, but they lack the iconic qualities necessary to act as a standard representation of gestures. My goal is to help create a foundational set of icons that are flexible, clear and distilled to a point where they could become a standard visual system to build from – ultimately to be used within apps for when explicit communication is needed.

Credits: PJ Onori

The guys over at WitFlow recently put together an Axure Cheat Sheet (PDF). It comes loaded with a bunch of potentially useful little shortcuts for the Axure masters out there (or shall I say, Axure FU Masters to be). Thanks for compiling & sharing this. :)

Credits: @WitFlow