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Planning and communication are two key elements in the development of any successful website or application. And that is exactly what the wireframing process offers: a quick and simple method to plan the layout and a cost-effective, time-saving tool to easily communicate your ideas to others. A wireframe typically has the basic elements of a Web page: header, footer, sidebar, maybe even some generated content, which gives you, your clients and colleagues a simple visually oriented layout that illustrates what the structure of the website will be by the end of the project and that serves as the foundation for any future alterations.

This article focuses on actual wireframing tools and standalone applications, as well as resources that you’ll need to build your own wireframe: wireframing kits, browser windows, form elements, grids, Mac OS X elements, mobile elements, which you’ll use in any typical graphics editor such as Photoshop or Illustrator. …Or you could use pen and paper.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Complete Wireframing Toolkits

Quommunnication Stencil Kit
A PSD file with common design elements for sketching and wireframing: form elements, RSS feed icons, colors, Advertising units, browser windows and grids.

Mac OS X Interface Stencil Kit
Leopardy interface stencil kit. This one makes extensive use of tables, for maximum flexibility while maintaining pixel precision.

Facebook Applications Stencil Kit
A pretty sizable collection of Facebook related elements to use in creating wireframes for Facebook applications.

Flex Stencil Kit
Includes all Flex components from Flex 3 Style Guide: panels, data grid, buttons, fields, links, toggle, menu, scrolls, accordion, tabs, list, data picker, tool tip, errors.

Eclipse Stencil Kit
This stencil enables you to easily prototype Eclipse (wizard) dialogs with OmniGraffle(TM).

Massive Web UI & Button Set
This set contains UI elements in three distinct styles: glossy, satin/light gradient, and one-color. The satin/light gradient set is available in 7 different colors (which you’ll find all of in the PSD file). Available are control buttons including arrows and basic symbols, info and text boxes, breadcrubs, buttons, and other navigation elements, drop-down and collapsible box styles, speech bubbles, search forms and loading elements.

Yahoo! Design Stencils – Design Pattern Library
You would be hard pressed to find a better wireframing resource than this one. The Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit is available for almost every application: OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG) and Adobe Photoshop. This huge library covers the following elements (basically, everything): ad units, calendars, carousels, charts and tables, UI controls, form elements, grids, menus and buttons, mobile (general), mobile (iPhone), navigation and pagination, OS elements, placeholder text, screen resolutions, tabs, windows and containers.

Free Sketching & Wireframing Kit
The Sketching & Wireframing Kit is a free set of elements for sketching and wireframing. It consists of form elements, icons, indicators, feedback messages, tool tips, navigation elements, image placeholders, embedded videos, sliders and common ad banners. The Kit comes in two vector formats, one for Adobe Illustrator and the other in SVG, which can be easily modified. It can also be downloaded in PDF and EPS formats.

EightShapes Unify
EightShapes Unify is a collection of templates, libraries and other assets that enable user experience designers to create more consistent and effective deliverables faster. The system uses the Adobe Creative Suite of products; Adobe InDesign is the primary authoring tool.

Wireframe Symbols
This download contains a wireframe symbol library and a full Adobe Illustrator file with all of the elements spread out on a board. To install the library just drag and drop the file named Wireframe Symbols.ai into your Adobe Illustrator “Symbols” directory. Once you open Illustrator, go to your Symbols Palette and load the library.

OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils
This is a set of shapes for making wireframes in OmniGraffle version 5.x (Mac OS X).

OmniGraffle UX Template
This is an OmniGraffle Pro template for interface design that includes shared layers for basic UX document needs; e.g. title page, wireframes, storyboards.

Web Page Elements
Using the open-source “Bitstream Vera” font set and free icons from FamFamFam, you should have most of your common web page elements covered, including headings, form elements, content management function, image placeholders, etc.

Web Browser Templates

Photoshop Browser Templates – Web Designer Toolkit
These Photoshop browser templates come in 1024×768 and 800×600 pixel sizes and cover nearly all browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Camino, even Netscape). For both sizes, the safe viewing area is clearly marked in a separate layer.

Browser Templates for the Website
These Photoshop browser templates for Internet Explorer, Firefox for Mac and Firefox for Windows have been mocked up in the following sizes: 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024 pixels.

Photoshop Browser Templates
This layered PSD file contains three different browser resolutions; all with easily editable titles, address bars, scroll bars and favicons. Just open the PSD and place the layers on top of the design that you are working on, and voila!

Browser Screens and Website Elements
A useful set of vector website assets.

Web-Safe Area Templates for Photoshop

All of the Web-safe area browser PSD templates listed below can be individually downloaded by choosing from the following resolutions: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960 and 1600×1200 pixels.

Windows Vista IE Web-Safe Area

Windows Vista Firefox Web-Safe Area

Windows XP IE Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Safari Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Firefox Web-Safe Area

Mac OS X Safari Web-Safe Area

Web Form Elements

Best Practice UX Forms Stencil
This is a comprehensive release of the stencil kit which follows best practices in UX form design. It provides three different ways of laying forms out, each with their own benefits. This version also provides different button layouts, a progress indicator, captcha code input field, labels and more.

Photoshop Form Element Templates
These Photoshop files include screenshots of all the common form elements as displayed in your selected operating system (Mac Classic, Mac OS X, Win XP and Win Classic). The form elements are separated into individual layers so that you can easily select, adjust or switch them as you please.

Browser Form Elements PSD
Included in this PSD file are form elements for Mac Firefox 3 and another for Vista IE7.

Web Form Elements Volume 1
Volume 1 contains a selection of Web user interace elements for forms in Photoshop format.

Web Form Elements Vol.2
This is Volume 2 of the Web Form UI Elements mentioned above and has been designed in a different style.

Photoshop Button Templates
These Photoshop button templates have been separated into individual layers to be easily selectable. You can choose from the following colors: dark blue, light blue, dark green, light green, yellow, orange, red and purple.

Web Browser Elements

You can select the element you need from whichever operating system and browser you use, and download them individually.

Windows Vista IE Form Elements

Windows Vista Firefox Form Elements

Windows XP IE Form Elements

Windows XP Firefox Form Elements

Mac OS X Firefox Form Elements

Mac OS X Safari Form Elements

Grid Templates

960px Photoshop Grid Template
This template has a guide for a three-column 20-pixel gutter design, with layers of washed-out colors to visualize both columns for the purpose of the rule of thirds. Additionally, it is broken down into six columns of 20-pixel gutters.

960 Grid Template for OmniGraffle

Illustrator Template for Blueprint CSS Comps
This Adobe Illustrator document features a 24-column grid for CSS frameworks such as Blueprint. It consists of guides that comply with Blueprint’s grid of 24 columns of 30 pixels, 10-pixel-wide gutters and a horizontal width of 950 pixels. Horizontal guides are provided at 18 pixels or a 1.5 em line-height for a 12-pixel base font.

Photoshop Template for Blueprint CSS Comps
This Photoshop document features a 24-column grid for CSS frameworks such as Blueprint. It consists of guides that comply with Blueprint’s grid of 24 columns of 30 pixels, 10-pixel-wide gutters and a horizontal width of 950 pixels. Horizontal guides are provided at 18 pixels or a 1.5 em line-height for a 12-pixel base font.

Mobile App Development Resources

iPad GUI PSD
The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable. You’ll notice there are a few new UI elements as compared to the iPhone interface. The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK.

Ultimate iPhone Stencil – Graffletopia
This Omnigraffe iPhone stencil kit contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors and all other iPhone UI elements. It can be easily resized horizontally by ungrouping, resizing the middle element and then regrouping the elements back into a single button.

iPhone 3G Stencil
Includes standard interface components for the iPhone 3G: buttons, fields, map elements, keyboards, icons. All components are on a transparent background and should re-size nicely.

iPhone GUI PSD 3.0
With Apple’s official release of the new iPhone 3.0 came a number of new GUI elements. Some of the changes and additions have been include in this GUI: map and map elements including curl, copy and paste elements; timeline bar editor; and horizontal iPhone and horizontal panel bars and keyboards.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit
This iPhone starter kit comes with several button elements as well as six different iPhone interface options.

iPhone GUI Elements
Free iPhone elements available as layered Photoshop (PSD) files.

iPhone GUI as Rich Symbols for Fireworks
This iPhone kit has been designed using Adobe Fireworks. It has several combinations, buttons, backgrounds, etc. It also has some lines of code to transform the simple vector symbols into rich symbols, with some variables.

Google Android GUI Application Mockup PSD
This Photoshop file contains all of the basic elements of Android 1.5, Google’s mobile operating system.

Palm Pre GUI PSD
This Palm Pre GUI PSD has been built with vectors for easy editing and scaling, and it contains most of the Pre’s GUI elements.

RIM Blackberry PSD
This download package contains 135 detailed layers for Blackberry app development.

Optional Wireframe Extras

Interactive Sketch Notation
The general idea behind this notation is the desire to visualize user interface states as well as user actions in a clear and rapid manner.

Storyboard Characters (via Google Chrome)

Proofreading Marks

Standard Web Banners
You can download these standard Web banners or ads individually (468×60 pixels, 768×60, 125×125, etc.). There are also templates for common but non-standard banner sizes (120×30, 230×33, 728×210, etc.).

Wireframe Icons, Royalty-Free EPS and PNG
The icon set includes EPS and PNG versions of the original Konigi Wireframe Icon Set and are suitable for use in vector drawing applications such as Adobe Illustrator as well as in Microsoft Visio.

WEB UI Treasure Chest
This PSD layered file, most of whose files are fully editable, contains more than 100 elements for website design.

Webdesigner kit
This Photoshop download contains registration fields, menus, checkboxes, radio buttons and cursors.

Printable Sketching Paper

A4 and A3 Sketching Grid Paper
This downloadable and printable 960-pixel-wide grid makes it easy to create a three-column (320 pixel), four-column (240 pixel), five-0column (192 pixel) or six-column (160 pixel) grid on a single sheet of paper. You have two sizes to choose from, A4 and A3.

Print and Sketch Wireframe Template

iPhone Application Sketch Template
The grid squares for this sketching paper are equal to 10 pixels. The tick marks indicate the height of the status bar, nav bar, keyboard, tab bar and toolbar. For best results, print on A4 borderless paper.

iPhone Wireframe Templates for Sketching
Two layouts are available, both in PDF and Visio (VSD) formats for quick iPhone mockups.

iPhone App Wireframe Template
Two versions are available, one in landscape and the other in portrait. Each version includes three pages: page 1 has a vertical screen and notes column; page 2 has a horizontal screen and notes column; page 3 has a three-screen layout that is great for drafting designs.

Printable Wireframe and Notes

The below 8.5 x 11-inch graph paper is made for visual designers, interaction designers and information architects. You’ll find styles for wireframing user interfaces, storyboarding interaction and plotting values on a 2×2 grid. Plus, you’ll get a basic grid for drafting site maps or anything else that comes up. Choose from the following:

Wireframe with Notes
This wireframe grid is divided into 24 columns, with gutters between each column. The grid is especially useful for designers who work within a CSS framework such as Blueprint.

Wireframe (Landscape)

Wireframe (Portrait)

Storyboard
This is a storyboard with four cells. Each cell contains a simple grid.

Storyboard with Notes
This is a storyboard with four cells. Each cell contains a simple grid. The area beneath each cell is ruled for notes.

Basic Paper
This is a basic grid box. Use it for concept diagrams, site maps, spectrums, tables and whatever else you sketch.

Wireframe Magnets (DIY Kit)

These DIY magnet template are based on the Konigi wireframe stencils and includes three sheets of elements that would be useful for whiteboard prototyping. Simply download and print the PDFs onto magnet sheets, and cut them out.

Form Elements

Tabs, Buttons and Bars

Windows and Dialogs

Further Resources And Some Wireframing Inspiration

web.without.words
A visual playground where designers take popular sites and reconstruct them in a wireframe.

Graffletopia
Graffletopia is a huge resource of free stencils for OmniGraffle (Mac-only, sadly). With OmniGraffle, you can quickly create high-quality wireframes, flowcharts and other diagrams.

Mockups To Go
Mockups To Go is a user-contributed collection of ready-to-use UI components and design patterns that were built using Balsamiq Mockups. You can download all of the components and design patterns to use in your mockups.

Wireframes Magazine
Wireframes Magazine is dedicated to all things wireframing and prototyping. It has a huge library of downloadable templates, samples and UI tools, and even a section for inspiration.

I {heart} wireframes
I {heart} wireframes is a great source of wireframing inspiration and resources. And yes, we all love wireframes!

Further Related Articles

• 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources
  More than 35 resources for creating better wireframes, including tutorials on different methods and a variety of tools available.
• Sketchy Wireframes: When you can’t (or shouldn’t) draw a straight line
  A nice article about computer-based sketchy wireframes that allow wireframes to look more like quick, hand-drawn sketches while retaining the reusability and polish that we expect from digital artitfacts.
• 16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing

About the Author

Paul Andrew is a freelance Web designer. He is chief admin for Speckyboy – Design Magazine, a Web design, Web development and graphic-design resource blog. Follow him on Twitter here: twitter.com/speckyboy.

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