Comments on Know Your Place

Nathan Curtis — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:31:05 GMT

I switched from PC to Mac just a few months after publishing the article. What I found was that instead of saving all the modular files as .ai, instead I saved them as “Adobe Illustrator Editable” .pdf files. With this, you should be able to link files easily while not embedding them as you explain.

In essence, everything about the files remained the same (including file size), but now I can (a) place them and update them with ease within Illustrator and (b) also view them quickly with Preview and Acrobat. The only downside? I had to associate the .pdf extension primarily with Illustrator instead of Preview or Acrobat, so that when within Illustrator I select “Edit Original”, it’ll open that linked file also in Illustrator. Kinda a pain when working generally through Finder or Email (because pdfs now open in AI unless you select “Open With…” via the contextual menu), but worth it in my case.

Phillip Smith — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:18:18 GMT

Love this approach in theory, but I’m having some challenges with the practice. First major obstacle is that Illustrator CS2 on the Mac doesn’t seem to want to link another .ai file via the Place dialog. It will happily insert the content of the .ai file into the View.ai, but updates via the Module.ai are not possible (because there’s no link). I suspect that one could get around this by creating PDFs, or image files of all of the modules—but that seems like it would require quite a bit more work overall.

Great idea though; just wish I could make it work for me!

Susan Lehto — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:51 GMT

I was Nathan’s first guinea pig for this method :) and I continue to use it for most of my projects. I work across a range of programs to create my various UI deliverables so being able to embed all of them into one InDesign document is nice. It allows me to create a cohesive & professional artifact and, sometimes more importantly, maintain consistency across artifacts.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:51 GMT

Are you referring to my comment, Andres (sorry, not having threads make conversations difficult)?

I don’t understand what you mean when you say you find it hard to “keep track of the module version and their relationships to the parent documentation version.” Why would you want to keep track of that? Doesn’t everything just use the latest version?

Andres Zapata — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:50 GMT

This is very good. This has worked well for me before. I have, however, gotten into self-inflicting versioning wars with this method. It gets confusing, after a while, to keep track of the module version and their relationships to the parent documentation version. Have you had much luck with that? Additionally, my computer’s performance does suffer when I have too many linked files per page. Thank you for documenting and sharing. This is excellent!

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:50 GMT

Personally, I use Fireworks for modular designs because it handles symbols very well I find. I create a file called “symbols” in which they are all stored, then import them as needed into the wireframe files I create. I then link the Fireworks PNGs into MS Word, where I annotate them (and get all the table of contents, page numbering and cross-references goodness I need). I can then also create clickable prototypes out of the same files if I want to using Fireworks’s (admittedly primitive) hot spots.

You have to run the “update” command on each of your wireframes to keep their symbols up to date though, which can be a pain, although there is an batch process extension you can get for this.

The tip on having an “archive” directory is nice, although I find I forget to archive versions enough, so now I just use a revision control system like VSS or CS-RCS (single use of which is free) to do it all for me. You can then do roll-backs, tag releases, etc.

You may have surmised from this that I don’t use Macs, and you’d be right, but I think all of the above is possible on that platform as well.

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:49 GMT

In general, I’ve seen no performance degradation or odd rendering in using clipping masks, nor some of the phantom Illustrator instability issues some have experienced with masks in general.

When rendering PDFs from Illustrator (which I rarely do, since my iterative and final documentation is usually via InDesign using the aforementioned linked files), I’ve found that the key to keeping file size down is to uncheck the “Preserve Illustrator Editiing Capabilities”. From there, file size is entirely manageable. Additionally, when creating PDFs from InDesign (via File > Export), the filesize for a specification of ~50-60 pages with 30-50 pieces of linked flows, views, and modules ends up being no more than 1 or 2 MB.

Giovanni Calabro — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:49 GMT

In using clipping masks, have you run into any pdf rendering issues or have ridiculously large PDFs? Thanks for the solid info in your article!

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:49 GMT

You are correct, and I find stencils very useful for a range of techniques for within-document reuse, except that stencils don’t translate for inclusion in other document types, such as Microsoft Word. I’ve found that the majority of IAs using Visio for wireframing will write their spec directly into and create documents from Visio. However, in other cases, such modules and other illustrations need to be reusable for requirements documents, including those composed by resources other than the information architect. In that case, use of stencils can constrain reuse, and the overall modularity suggested by this article breaks down.

Jean-Philippe Cyr — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 11:29:58 GMT

Placing artwork
Inserting a module from a separate file is a solution that ca be adopt in Visio, but there is better a solution.

It is to work with the Document Stencil. Compare to the General Stencils where the shapes/objects place in your document have not direct link with their masters, the objects/shapes placed in the Document Stencil share all their properties. A change made on a shape in the Document Stencil will change all the instances of that shapes in your entire document.

Document Stencil Shapes are very useful for navigation. Better than being place in a background, those widgets can be place where ever you want in your document and be change very quickly and easily.

The properties (ex: the fill color) of your shape (dragged from the Document Stencil) can be changed in your document without changing the master. That way you can easily highlight the selected link/button of the navigation in a given page/section. If at some point a new level is added up in your navigation (ex: passing from 5 to 6 links), you simply add that new link in the master (of the Document Stencil) changing the instance of your navigation in all the pages wills still keeping the independent highlighted links/buttons.

Very useful.