Flash @ CSM

Usually  at the end of the semester, I try and round up some Flash or Adobe swag to give away to students who present the best final projects. This semester I’ve secured licence (to give away to one of the best projects) for a really cool application called Mockups from Balsamiq that I’ll be demoing later in the semester. Mockups is a Flex based tool that allows you to quickly make functional mockups for a project or as an explanation to an existing project. It offers dozens of built in standard navigational elements which allow you to quickly design the functionality of your project taking the stress off the design elements (since it looks like a sketch).

It’s incredibly difficult to work with clients (and even supervisors/bosses) to define the functionality of a project when there is design elements involved. So many times I’ve gotten caught up in those silly conversations during a meeting that focus on serif vs sans serif fonts or logo placement when you are talking about functionality. Mockups is a powerful tool to seperate design from functionality, and will allow you to get your job done faster.

I’ll schedule a class demo of this in the comming weeks so you can see it in action, or just go visit the Balsamiq.com website for more details and see how you can integrate this tool into a wiki. I’m looking forward to thier next project.