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In this chapter, we design and wireframe a web-based photo gallery. Along the way, we'll walk through some of the design decision making.
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[?music?]
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[Design]
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[Nick Pettit] The best way to start any design
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is by figuring out what the problem is that you're trying to address.
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In this case, we have a pretty common problem,
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which is we just want to create a photo gallery to display some photos.
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So sometimes, I'll start with pen and paper and sort of rough things out,
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but very quickly I'll usually go into a mockup tool--
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like Balsamiq Mockups in this case--
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but really, you can use whatever mockup tool that you want
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or whatever workflow you want.
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It all comes down to personal preference
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and it's really up to you.
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So let's go ahead and get started.
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The first thing I like to do when I get into a mockup tool like Balsamiq Mockups
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is I like to design from the inside out,
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and the main thing that we're going to have in our design is photos,
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so let's start there.
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So we'll go ahead and go to say, Layout,
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and we know that we're going to want to have something to contain our photos--
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actually, let's go to Containers--
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and we'll just make a rectangle canvas.
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IIt doesn't really matter what size--
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that looks good--
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and let's go over to Media and we'll go ahead and drop in an image,
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just like that.
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And we don't need to actually include a placeholder image.
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We can just have an X; that's fine.
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We're going to have eight photos in our gallery,
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so we'll drop in a few more of those--
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actually, let's just duplicate these.
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So we have two there,
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and now we have four,
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and there's our eight photos.
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Now, of course, I've already designed this project
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and we've seen the finished product, but let's go ahead and head down one path
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that I started out with.
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We want to be able to click on our photos and have one of them become larger
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and one way we could do that is by having our eight photos here
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and then enlarging one of these photos
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and then having all the others reflow around it,
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so let's go ahead and sort of mock that up quickly.
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So i'll move these down here real quick,
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and we'll realign them in just a second,
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and we need to make our container larger, of course.
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This would still use CSS3.
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And we'd go ahead and just enlarge our one photo
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and we would have a really nice transition as the photo scaled up
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and all of the other photos reflowed around it.
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However, as you can see, this isn't really practical.
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I was even having a hard time just moving around those photos,
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so a much better approach would be to just keep that large photo on top
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instead of having all of the other photos reflow in the gallery
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because that increases the height of the page
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and just makes it really awkward to interact with.
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So let's go ahead and just delete that
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and we'll go ahead and put all these back,
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and let's actually just delete these and we'll go ahead and duplicate this row,
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and we'll move it down there, and then we can just make our container smaller again.
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So instead of heading down that route, let's go ahead and just take one of these photos
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and we'll duplicate it and just go ahead and enlarge it
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and we'll leave it on top of all the other photos that we already have.
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And when we enlarge photos like that,
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the original photo will be removed, of course, because it will now be the large photo.
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When you're designing, it's important to go ahead and try out a couple of different things,
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and then when you find something you like,
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take that design and iterate on it.
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So now that we have our nice little photo gallery here,
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let's go ahead and create the rest of this site.
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So I'm actually going to get rid of this large photo
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and we'll just put our smaller photo back--just like that--
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and we're just going to need a little bit of text,
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so we want kind of a larger header here--there we go--
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and we're going to call this gallery My Photos.
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And we'll center it on the page there,
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and actually, I think I'd like that to be a little bit larger--
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that's pretty good.
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We'll center it, and then we need to move the rest of our content down.
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There we go.
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It would also be nice to include some information about this gallery,
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so a good place to put that would be right below it.
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So we'll go ahead and grab some paragraph text here,
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and we'll also grab another subtitle.
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We'll say About this Gallery for our subtitle
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and we'll put it down below here.
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Then we'll put some paragraph text here.
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We can just go ahead and copy and paste this text.
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We probably don't need this hyperlink here
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or any special kind of markup,
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so we'll go ahead and delete that.
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And then, we can just copy and paste this to go ahead and generate some texture there.
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We'll have one column of text on the left
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and another column of text on the right,
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so we need to make these a little bit smaller.
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We'll have some nice space in between them;
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I just want to increase that a little bit
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and that looks pretty good.
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Normally, you'd want to use the actual text that you're going to use,
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but when you're mocking up things in a low-fi fashion like this,
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it's okay to just use placeholder or lorem ipsum text like we have here.
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The reason you want to try and always use the real text that you're going to use
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is because it can give you a better idea of how much space it's going to take up on the page.
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So if we scroll up here,
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it looks like we have a header, a gallery, some text about the gallery,
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and that's pretty much it.
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It's a very simple design.
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