Can you describe the stencils you contributed, why you made them, and what you personally use them for?
I co-lead the Vancouver chapter of the IxDA and one of the conversations that I’ve been interested in discussing with the group is “What is open source UX and is it possible?”. It’s a tricky topic to define, and the more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that open sourcing tools is the first place to start, rather than focusing on definitions. I figure that the best thing you can do is to put tools in designers’ hands and let them create, so that’s exactly what I did.
You can find more details on this process in a blog post i have written called Lightweight Prototyping with InDesign.
Can you discuss how these differ from the Eightshapes adaptation of the Yahoo! stencil kit (since both are used in InDesign)?
Basically, I wanted to customize the PDF that you had already provided using the same level of fidelity as in the Illustrator version. I realized that it was a compilation of repeating images, rather than complete, editable vectors.
That said, I was making a move back to InDesign from OmniGraffle and saw it as an opportunity to create a higher-fidelity iPhone stencil for wireframing, prototyping, and quickly skinning an app to play with differences in look and feel, and to enable you to move that much further with InDesign.
The 8Shapes stencil doesn’t have the default gradients or some of the other interaction elements that I wanted to use in my wires (key/num pad, list select tumbler, etc.). That said, I didn’t create icons to the same extent that they did. I basically mimicked what was in the existing Yahoo! stencil.
I would love to add more to it eventually when I have time. I like having the option of removing the gradient if need be for basic wireframing yet have them readily available for quick mockups. I think they’re a good complement to each other depending on your use case.
What else would you see in the pattern library?
I’d love to see the Yahoo stencils in higher fidelity, much like the iPhone stencil, therefore on par with the OmniGraffle fidelity.
A general library on gesture based patterns would also be quite useful.