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On the Geniant blog, T.Scott Stromberg exposes his craft of wireframe sketching. I also spend most of my ideation time sketching. It's lovely to see other people's methods for getting ideas down. I love Stromberg's comments and comic book style.

This might sound kind of pathetic, but seeing the pens and paper he uses is the kind of thing I really geek out on. I love that he's pimping out the Behance dot grid pads. A designer gave me a pad of that stuff recently after I got him a leatherette Rhodia 3x4 case. I carry one of those with me everywhere with a Pentel .7mm pencil. When I sit down to work on a large project, though, I use the Tufte 11x17 graph paper, with the Pentel and a Micron. I have to agree with his method of inking the sketches. I've gotten accustomed to doing that when I have to scan sketches to send to people, and tracing is something I'm used to doing from comic book sketching.

Another option to consider in a pinch, or if you can't stand to buy expensive paper, is to print your own graph paper with the graph paper pdf generator or download grid and graph paper from McGraw Higher Ed. Will do paper up to 11 x 17 and lets you specify line weight and color.

I also created 2 different grid paper templates you can use. Download the PDFs at 8.5" x 11" or 11" x 17" that you can download.

Thanks, Soul Soup, for the link to Stromberg's article.

http://geniantsandbox.com/2008/02/28/the-fine-art-of-wireframes

When it comes to researching user's screen resolution, I'm a strong believer that vertical positioning matters most when considering key issues such as location of identifying elements like site name and h1-type headings, and elements that satisfy business rules such as ad location. The B&A article, "Blasting the Myth of the Fold" addresses this issue well, and I'm in agreement that "the fold" matters little if the above issues are dealt with. But the issue of browser width is still one that is heavily dependent on audience, and knowledge of what your web analytics tool records about actual users.

When you have a site that has not gone public yet, however, you will have the need to address the issue of resolution in the absence of real data for your site. So where do we turn? We benchmark. Here are a few of my sources for researching this kind of information:

1. Start with sites that provide a log analysis service across a broad range of sites and publish their aggregated stats. Example services that provide this data include The Counter, W3Counter, and Net Applications.
2. Compare for sanity against individual sites, especially other sites in your industry, or sites you may already publish. W3Schools publishes their stats, for instance, but that audience is heavily skewed towards technical users.

If you have to provide a few sites as a benchmark sources like these may be helpful. Base your browser width decisions on your understanding of who will be accessing your site, just as you would consider user research when deciding what features to provide in your product.

For a bit of information about the estimates you get from aggregated sources, see this Wikipedia entry on Usage of Web Browsers.

Sorry for the lull in activity this past few weeks. I'm doing my last days at my current job and getting ready to transition to a new gig in a week.

After the last 2 months with this site, I've assessed some of the functionality I went out with, and am doing some cleanup. I launched with all the blades out and am now pulling them back in to only expose the essentials. The goal will be to simplify the navigation, and let the screenshots take prominence. There will be some reconfiguring of database searches and sort options as well, now that I've found what the typical flow will be for this site. I'm also going to remove the design/interface submission options for now, and may go another direction with regard to that.

Anyway, for now, I've stripped out the graphics and will get a slightly more low-fi design up in the next few weeks.