Published 3 years ago on April 6, 2005
Free Visio IA Stencil
I'm giving away a slightly scaled back version of my Visio stencil and template that I use every single waking moment. These are free for the taking, but I would appreciate a little bit of credit out of courtesy. That's easy enough, right?
Update: There is an updated version of the Visio stencils and templates available.
Before getting started there's a couple of neat little things you should know about.
Regarding the stencil
- You can right-click on radio buttons and checkboxes and check, select, enable, or disable them. This is probably one of my favorite features, and I couldn't live without it.
- The annotations were created using Dan Brown's article on Boxes and Arrows. They go one step further than his example by not only updating the number of the annotation automatically but also the color.
Regarding the wireframes template
- The visible page titles at the top of the pages will update to mirror the value from the page name in your drawing explorer.
- The date in the footer automatically updates itself to the current date.
- Page numbers obviously automatically update themselves as well.
- There are legal and letter sized backgrounds to use for the main template. Make sure to take advantage of them. If you are using Visio 2003, you can have a document with mixed sizes.
Downloads
You can download the latest version of the Visio stencils and templates at my personal site.
That's it, let me know if there are any problems. Enjoy.
Comments are closed.
The links to the wireframe templates are brok'n. Other than that, thanks!
Thanks Adam. It's fixed now. Just needed to be vsd instead of vss. Stupid copy and past mistake on my part.
Do we get to see examples of your wireframes as well? (:
Matt - There's a distinct possibility. Most of it is confidential naturally, but I think I have some that I could show. I'll keep that in mind.
Wow Viso, that takes me back to wasting time designing an office floor plan at college! great fun.
I don't use Viso, but I bet I can covert these into something more usable. Cheers
I can't imagine doing wireframes in anything but Visio. I have never been happy with the results from illustrator, Indesign or pretty much any other product as they never seem to have enough support for my specific needs.. it's all build it from scratch. So sure I can make wireframes in MS Word using the drawing tools but why waste my time ont hat when there is a product that has plug-in support for IA specific elements and templates? I don't know.
Tom - What do you mean by convert them into something more usable? Using another tool? Improving the stencils? Do tell. I'd love to hear.
I've actually been using PowerPoint recently. It really speeds up the process for me.
You could make a really interesting article by gathering a group of developers, wireframing an existing web site and then publishing the RAW results here. It would be very informative to all involved - even the participants..
Cool! Thanks.