OmniGraffle for Website Layout Development
One thing I love about blogs is that every now and then someone mentions a tip which totally changes how you work. This happened to me yesterday. Peter over at The Blog Studio wrote about how to design a blog. And among the couple dozen juicy paragraphs in the article he wrote this.
I use a fabulous program called OmniGraffle (mac only) to play around with site layout and element hierarchy (more on this in a moment). I like to stay out of my graphics editor, since the potential to get sucked into designing visual elements is so strong. You really want to avoid jumping into the visual part of the design at this stage, since you’ll just end up getting lost.
Now why didn’t I think of that before? One of those things that is so simple yet will totally change my workflow when it comes to designing website and blog layouts. Using OmniGraffle is the perfect tool since it allows you to build up something very quick that will actually look quite like a finished product without much effort.
In the past 24 hours what I’ve really liked about building draft layouts in OmniGraffle is how I can pickup and move things around, change colors, apply different gradients, etc significantly faster than I could do in Photoshop. I know there have been times when I’ve been working on a design in Photoshop and I get stuck with something I don’t particularly care for because it just becomes too difficult to make a radical change. I can quickly make those radical changes with OmniGraffle and make sure I like it before moving on.
This will be a huge help to someone like me who doesn’t consider deign as my strongest skill…. by a long shot. That’s why I’ve hired Peter at The Blog Studio in the past to design layouts for me. I’ll probably still need to use them in the future for the creative aspects, but using OmniGraffle I’ll be able to come to them with a better picture of what I’m looking for.
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