Announcing EightShapes Unify!

EightShapes Unify is a collection of templates, libraries, and other assets that enable user experience designers to create more consistent, effective deliverables faster. The system utilizes the Adobe Creative Suite of products; primarily, Adobe InDesign is the key authoring tool.

The system is often used by designers – and larger user experience teams – to rapidly produce artifacts like design strategy, wireframes, style guides, specs, and more. The system has many parts, but the basic templates and symbol libraries are pretty straightforward:

• Document templates (such as an 8.5×11 letter landscape format) that includes text variables for titles, print-friendly versions, varied grids, and a deep reservoir of type, object, and table styles
• Page layouts for approximately 100 common page layouts, such as a chunked wireframe, color palette for a style guide, component specs, mental models, personas, and competitive two-by-two plots
• Symbol libraries for flows, maps, markers (little numbered circles), callouts, frames (like a box with jagged bottom into which you place a wireframe), project plans, reviews, and more
• Scriptable document starting points for when you create standard documents (like a competitive analysis) or need to automate the starting point for a larger document (like a style guide)

Well, the time is here. We’ve got a website where people can download it. But, given that some of us are writing books, doing client work, etc, the site isn’t perfect. Over the coming three months, we’ll be publishing a larger collection of training videos that introduce you to the system and help you create flows, annotated wireframes, sitemaps, competitive analyses, and other common deliverables.

Note also that the download includes only the deliverable document templates – wireframe templates are separate. We’re saving the wireframe for later, but there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own wireframe templates, or just placing your own artwork into deliverables no matter what tool you use to design screens and other visualizations (Fireworks, Omnigraffle, Visio, and especially Illustrator and Photoshop since they play so well with InDesign).

In the mean time, feel free to download the system, play with it, share your ideas, and let us know what you think.