More Stencil Fun For Designers

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Earlier in the week, Alex had a post here on the SitePoint blogs about a cool little stencil kit for designing iPhone apps. So while we’re thinking about stencils, I wanted to point out another set of stencils that are available for free download. Last year, the Yahoo Developer’s Network released a very handy kit for web and application designers called the Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit , filled choc-a-block with goodies to make designing mock-ups a little easier.

What’s in the kit?

The kit consists of sixteen separate graphics files which you can use as templates or guides for your own designs. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. They are perfect for keeping as a library that you can refer to, rather than creating your own graphics from scratch.

Ad Units: A full graphic template of all the standard ad units used on the web.
Calendars
Carousels
Charts and Tables
User Interface Controls
Form Elements
Grids For Page Layouts
Menus and Buttons for phone and web applications.
Mobile – General
Mobile – iPhone: The graphic has a full breakdown of the user interface.

Navigation and Pagination
OS Elements
Placeholder Text
Screen Resolutions
Tabs
Windows and Containers

To use a design stencil, download the appropriate stencil kit for whichever design application you are using. Launch the program and add stencil objects to your projects. Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and Visio users can will be able to use vectors and can therefore ungroup stencil objects to customize and manipulate size, layout, and aesthetics. The .png files can be used in many different image editors, not just Photoshop.

The kit is available for free download in a number of formats;

Adobe Photoshop (PNG)
Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG)
OmniGraffle
Visio (XML)

You can download the stencil kit here.

Related Reading:

Have you used this design kit or something similar? Do you have any recommendations for designers?