Deliverables with EightShapes Unify: June 2009 Workshop

At a Glance

• Date: June 26, 2009
• Time: 1pm - 5pm (4 hours)
• Location: The Mansion at Strathmore, Bethesda, MD (Convenient parking and metro access!)
• Price: US$188

Outline

1. Getting Started with EightShapes Unify
2. Learning Templates (…and Adobe InDesign) by Building the Templates
3. Planning Documents with Recipes
4. Assembling Deliverables using Page Patterns & Linked Files
5. Applying Design Annotations
6. Publishing Your Deliverable

Workshop Details

This course will introduce the EightShapes Unify collection of deliverables and libraries, and demonstrate how to use them in the context of creating and documenting user experience. We’ll begin by defining what EightShapes Unify is, what you can produce with it, and how it can fit within your process. Our focus will be deliverable documents, those paginated, annotated PDFs you can produce using Adobe InDesign and our templates like a wireframe review, user research report, competitive analysis, style guide, or detailed design specification.

The first hour will conclude with an introduction to the various InDesign file types relative to the templates and libraries you can start with. Then throughout the second hour, we’ll teach you about the templates by building the most popular one – letter landscape – from scratch. We’ll create a new document, set up pages, grids, masters, and layers. We’ll create new colors, add typography like page titles and headers, and build useful objects, and then we’ll create reusable styles for each one. Ultimately, you’ll walk away with a good appreciation with what the templates provide as a starting point.

You’ll get a great introduction to how Adobe InDesign works – in the context of the templates you can use! However, note that the course is not InDesign 101. Learners should be familiar with InDesign and interested in creating better deliverables faster using EightShapes Unify templates that are based on InDesign. If you don’t know InDesign, you’ll still get plenty of value, but we won’t be teaching the basics like the Type tool and how to use the Pages panel.

In the latter portion of our afternoon, we’ll collaborate together to plan a “recipe” for our deliverable document, build out that recipe using page layout patterns (like a chunked wireframe, site map, and persona), and cover the basics of placing and linking artwork into your deliverable. We’ll close with a look at effective ways of annotating your designs with markers and overlays followed by publishing your deliverable as a PDF.

While InDesign has proven to be a great tool for producing wireframes too, we will not be covering techniques for creating the screen designs themselves (whether via InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, Omnigraffle, or another tool). Instead, we’ll cover Wireframes with EightShapes Unify in a separate workshop in August 2009, and teach Comps with EightShapes Unify and Copy with EightShapes Unify after that should demand warrant.

Format

The workshop is a combination of lecture (slides), discussion, and software demonstration. In particular with this workshop, there will be ample software demonstration but no time dedicated to software exercises done independently by the participants. No computer hardware or software will be provided, although attendees are welcome to bring laptops and follow along as they are able.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will know:

• How to use our templates & libraries to quickly create effective deliverables
• How to use essential InDesign features for creating user experience documents
• How to plan deliverables, reuse page layouts, and thread in your design by placing and maintaining linked files
• How to annotate designs via markers, overlays, and specs
• How to publish effective PDF documents