Discover the final steps to perfect your website wireframe. The article walks you through the process of making adjustments to enhance user experience and aesthetics.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to perfectly align your cart to the top right corner of your website wireframe using guides and the alignment tool. Working within a 150 x 150 pixel area allows for a neat and balanced look.
- It further details how to adjust and resize your search bar outside of the 150 x 150 square, maintaining proportions and center alignment. This ensures that the search bar does not overshadow other important elements on the page.
- The article concludes with a demonstration of how to fine-tune your design, such as adjusting the stroke of various elements to ensure uniformity, changing the width of the title or the separation between buttons, and rounding out the edges of buttons and other elements for a more aesthetically pleasing look.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we will finalize our website wireframe. Throughout this video, we will make a couple of changes to our website wireframe. However, feel free to make changes as you see fit and truly customize it to be your own.
The first change I’d like to make is to zoom in to the top-right-hand side, scrolling up with the mouse, and scrolling down while holding CTRL. I’d like to move this cart within the top-right 150 × 150 pixel corner.
To do this, I’ll want to create guides. I will click and drag a guide, releasing it about 150 pixels in from 1920, or at 1770. I will release, and I’ll notice the guide disappears. This is because the guides are currently hidden.
To reveal them, I will right-click and select 'Show Guides.' We will see that the guide I previously created was hidden, but once I’ve revealed the guides, it’s still there. I will then right-click again to unlock the guides and click this guide.
For the X value, I will do 1920 minus 150, giving me 1770. This cart is well within the 150 × 150 area, and I want to align it within this space. I will go to the 'Menu Graphics' section and create a square within the area we’ve defined.
I will click and drag from one intersection to the other so that I can align the cart between them. I will then hit V on the keyboard for the selection tool and hold shift as I select both the cart and the box I’ve just drawn. Going to my alignment options, I will go to the control bar, select 'Align Key Object, ' and make sure that my square is selected as the key object, ensuring that I’m aligned horizontally and vertically.
I can then delete the square I created for alignment, and my cart is now aligned within the 150 × 150 area, in good parallel with the logo on the top-left-hand side.
Next, I want to make sure that our search bar is outside of this 150 × 150 square. To do this, I’m simply going to select it and drag it to the left, holding shift to keep it aligned with the center of the title bar.
I will also resize the search bar to match the height of the cart. To do this, I will drag the bottom while holding shift to maintain proportions and drag the top to the top of the grocery cart, again holding shift to maintain proportions.
As we can see, this bar is now too large, so let’s zoom out and drag it to the left, holding shift to ensure it’s outside of the 150 × 150 box. We now need to move the left two points of our search bar, shortening it slightly so it’s within the guides.
To do this, we will hit A on the keyboard for the Direct Selection Tool. Then, select the top-left anchor and, holding shift, select the bottom-left anchor. We will then drag to the right, making sure to hold shift to drag only horizontally, and release when we intersect with these guides.
Let’s make one more change: hitting V on the keyboard and selecting both the search bar and, holding shift, selecting the cart to ensure that the stroke for both is set to one. We will then hit ENTER.
Next, let’s zoom out. Looking at our logo on the left-hand side, it seems like the ellipse (or circle) isn’t quite the same stroke width as the ones on the right; it appears a bit more faint. To double-check this, we will select the ellipse, and sure enough, the stroke is less than one point. We will double-click the stroke in the control bar, type one, and hit ENTER.
From here, our title bar looks good. However, feel free to adjust the width of the title and the separation between them.
Additionally, if you'd like to make changes to the buttons, we can use live corners to round out the edges and release. If we want to apply the same rounded edges, we can copy the dimensions from the control bar for the corner radius, which is set to 37 pixels. If we click on the other rectangle, we can use live corners to round it to 37 pixels, then adjust the value in the control bar by double-clicking, typing 37, and hitting ENTER.
As one final change, let’s zoom in on the cart and change our perspective. Let’s round out the edges of this cart.
To do this, I will hit A and select the middle anchor, then drag the live corner in. Let’s do the same thing on the bottom middle point, dragging it in so that the cart is more rounded.
Finally, let’s zoom out using the Zoom Tool (shortcut Z on the keyboard) and holding ALT, I’ll click.
We’ve now finished up our website wireframe. Let’s right-click and hide our guides for a better view. Then, we can save our work using CTRL + S on the keyboard. In the next video, we will begin working with charts on a new project. See you in the next video!