Designing Mobile Interfaces

Appendix B. Design Templates and UI Guidelines

Drawing Tools and Templates

For many years, there was no particular assistance provided to those seeking to design for mobile handsets. Over time, books and other documents and supporting information has emerged. Now, major software vendors such as Adobe are embedding mobile-centric technology into their products.

New ones are constantly being added, or replaced, so please help us keep this up to date. Visit the wiki at http://www.4ourth.com/wiki or contact us with updates you may encounter.

Templates and Stencils

Templates and stencils are graphic items you can use with various drawing programs to create concepts, mockups, process diagrams, comps, or graphics for final designs.

First listed are organizations with either general templates or a number of templates for different devices and OSes. This is followed by a list by platform, as recently most designers and agencies have become concentrated on one or two devices or platforms, leading to a surge in such templates.

Note that this is just those we’ve found, or found useful. Many more may exist, or be included as part of the various manufacturer and OS developer links in the UI Guidelines section. Also be aware that by no means are all of these reviewed for quality, and are just checked to make sure that (at the time of this writing) they were valid links to real files, and are in the right category.

Design Organizations

The following organizations provide valuable resources for drawing ...