Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Nathan Curtis

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:23 GMT

Submitted by Nathan Curtis (nathan@nathancurtis.com), UX Design Lead @ K12, Inc.

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:22 GMT

Donna & Liz,
Thanks for your comments. I would certainly approach this from an methodology perspective. While Illustrator is my vector-based program of choice, I use Visio extensively as well, and would be curious myself to know the analogous Visio techniques.
Nathan

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:22 GMT

Background pages can be very effective for making your document professional by providing information on contact (name, group, email, etc), sponsoring company (via a logo), versioning & date, and more. I’ve also found background pages are effective in creating a reusable frames for your page and spec (ie, columns for annotations, etc) if you choose to go that route.

Shapes are probably closer, employed via edited stencils across documents. I’d advocate the use of *Insert > Object > Create From File* followed by *Crop*ping the included object to highlight only the component variation of interest.

For example, imagine you’re including a mini shopping cart through varied views in your app. The mini-cart will ultimately have numerous potential displays, including but not limited to empty, one item, multiple items, different item types potentially requiring different attributes to be displayed, etc. These *component* variations would be centrally stored in .vsd file with a page containing the grid of these variations. For each *wireframe* variation (in a single file or probably best here in separate files), include the object and crop it to the proper, single variation. Then, you can include each *wireframe* as needed into a *flow*, also as objects but probably resized to be much smaller unless the plotter is your destination. Finally, as one *spec*’s the final design, the *component* grid could be included as a figure where, cropped or not, you can annotate the variations in tandem, for such illustrations can be powerful in conveying the breadth of component functionality for a developer.

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.

Nathan Curtis — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:22 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.

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.

Nathan Curtis — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:26:26 GMT

Nancy,

Thanks for catching that typo. I’ve updated and replaced the PDF with the corrected version.

Nathan