Placehold.it is a “quick and simple image placeholder service” for web designers and developers. To use, simply format the URL with the image size details of your choice and the image is created dynamically. For example, the following URL generated the image above: http://www.placehold.it/570×300. Various image formats, colors, and placeholder text can also be specified.

http://www.placehold.it

There is hope however. Imulus Design + Interactive has developed www.supportdetails.com, a simple web application that allows your clients to send you all the relevant details of their setup by just entering their email address and name and your email address. In fact, they don’t even have to do that much if you direct them to a “customized” link with the relevant contact info already entered (Mac geek tip: setup a TextExpander snippet of the link pre-filled with your email address as the recipient).

Check out http://www.supportdetails.com

A simple explanation: TweepML is a format to share groups of Twitter users. TweepML.org is a service that allows you to create and manage your lists, and also find other interesting lists to follow.

It’s one of those ideas that is just so simple in origin and elegant in excecution that you can’t help but love it. We don’t do a lot of community projects like this at Design Commission, but it was a lot of fun for us and we hope to keep evolving TweepML.org as its community grows.

Feel free to follow along with the Design Commission crew at TweepML.

Family portrait made with my new web site design stencil from @designcom.http://twitpic.com/82yxa

So, how about it–what are you doing with your DC stencils?

U.S Government Photos

The Library of Congress Photostream

GRIN–Great Images in NASA

We recently sent out a small batch of our newly designed website interface stencils, along with a handy sketchpad, complete with browser chrome and grid, to a handful of people. We’re planning on having another batch run which we’ll be selling on our site sometime in January. In the mean time, if you’re interested in buying a Web Stencil Kit head over to the shop.

DC Web Stencil Kit:
+ Custom-etched eraser shield
+ Browser pad (fully W3C compliant!)
+ A handy mechanical pencil for those “hard to reach” places

One danger with wireframes is the potential to get stuck in the details of how they look. Understandably, clients are eager to see how their site is going to look. Inevitably this leads to questions and comments about how the wire-frames are laid out, if that’s the “right” color of grey, etc. However, until we’ve defined all the functionality, it’s extremely difficult to know what’s its final design will look like.

To combat this we’ve put together a set of interface components, which allow us to quickly put together wireframes using OmniGraffle (for you Window’s users think Visio). By organizing commonly used elements that have been designed to look intentionally “sketchy” into a drag-and-drop stencil we can assemble concepts quickly and help keep the conversation focused on functionality—not aesthetics.

If you’re into this kind of stuff, feel free to download the stencil below. Please note that we’ve used the free font FG Amura as the font in the stencil (because comic sans is evil…) so you’ll need to download that font or substitute your own to get things to work.

As for our process in creating these stencils, we started with the Yahoo Interface Library stencil set. Then:

1. Drag all the components I wanted to recreate from the stencil to a blank canvas in OG.
2. Save the OG file as a PDF.
3. Open the PDF in Illustrator and apply the Roughen filter to the lines, then choose Object > Path > Simplify to remove a lot of the extra points created by illustrator.
4. Change the typeface – I used FG Amura which is free, but you could use whatever you want.
5. Save the PDF and open it in OG. Then just create a new stencil and go to town.

Here’s a video that shows the process of creating the elements for the stencil.

Creating Sketch Wireframes in OmniGraffle from Design Commission on Vimeo.

» Download the Stencil

» Download the font, FG Amura

Enjoy!