[Sigia-l] Intelligent signs at Microsoft

[Todd Warfel]

On Aug 17, 2005, at 9:03 AM, Stew Dean wrote:

> Why use illustrator when you can use InDesign and have multiple  
> pages and better handling for blocks of text. You can happily build  
> a functional specification in Indesign with all the written  
> content, wireframes and site maps[..]

Well, for one, wireframes, sitemaps, and taskflows are more than  
blocks of text. Second, InDesign isn't a drawing application.  
InDesign is fine for assembling wiframes and adding notations, but  
it's not sufficient for actually creating the wireframes - it's  
drawing capabilities are just too primitive.

> I can't think of any other program quite as able to do all those  
> three jobs in such a dedicated way. Other wise it's a mixture of  
> Visio, Illustrator and Word.

Um, it can't do any of these jobs well in a dedicated way. It can do  
wireframes in a sub-acceptable method, but it's not sufficient for  
taskflows, sitemaps (especially our model), or for wireframes (at  
least for us).

We end up drawing the screens in Illustrator (a real drawing  
application), then assembling them in InDesign (through heavy use of  
master pages). It's a really crappy workflow, but it's the best  
solution we've found so far - and we've tried several (e.g. Visio,  
Visio w/Excel, Pages w/PDFs, Illustrator w/Multi-page plug-in,  
InDesign, InDesign w/Illustrator, Freehand).

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
Design & Usability Specialist
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