Great little meeting with Russell. We are working on some mock-ups for a mini project that we are going to build together. The mini project will end up beign a dashboard of sorts (somewhat limited, but just for practice). We were working on the mock-ups today. We are going from a super simple paper and pencil drawing to a layout with boxes and placeholders (wireframe). The wireframe is great for conversations and being able to ask questions without going into crazy amounts of detail.

We were working in Adobe XD and putting different notes in different places. Russell was making a place for notes for interactions (how it works) in one place, notes for functionality (what it does), and then other interactions and user experience stuff (UI/UX). We ended up having a good discussion about budgets, dreaming big, but keeping things within a budget related scope.

We ended up jumping in to Snagit and going over quick ways to grab and build a quick mock-up. Russell also showed me how to download Adobe Fireworks (substitute for Adobe Photoshop - much easier). That is awesome, I loved using Fireworks. So much faster and better for simple web graphics.

Anyways, we got the wireframe mock-up done and then started moving into a more realistic version. He was calling it a high-fidelity mock-up (more true to form and even prepped with fake data and charts). We built a basic mock-up with headers, footers, navigation, and backgrounds. We then started to duplicate that basic template to make the other pages. One step at a time.