Pencil Project – Easy and Quick Prototype Creation

Productivity Software
August 13, 2024
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Pencil Project is a free open-source program for creating prototypes, diagrams, and wireframes. It’s available in versions for Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions.

Main Features of the Pencil Project Application

Pencil Project is an application for visually representing ideas. These can be sketches, website or application structures (wireframes), flow diagrams, or graphical user interfaces. Various built-in shape collections are offered for drawing different types of user interfaces, from desktop to mobile platforms. Starting from version 2.0.2, Pencil Project comes with pre-installed Android and iOS UI templates.

Wireframes are basic drafts or skeletons of web pages or applications. The application has predefined shapes for creating wireframes, such as buttons, menus, text input fields, and other UI elements. Besides wireframes, interactive web pages can be created by adding links between pages and shapes. The application supports options for simulating clicks and similar actions to make the user environment as authentic as possible. Another feature is flow diagrams that are created using shapes and connectors between them. Organizational charts can be used to display the structure of companies and teams, and site maps are used to create structures of websites or applications.

Pencil Project has large libraries of shapes for user interfaces and icons. Additional libraries can be downloaded from the internet. Clipart listed by this tool is in vector format and therefore good for users when scaling to appropriate sizes. The application supports Drag and Drop. Elements can have their properties changed such as size, color, and text. Created documents can be exported to PNG, PDF, SVG, ODT, and HTML. Due to support for exporting to different formats, documents can be easily shared.

Who is Pencil Project Useful For and Why?

Pencil Project is intended for designers, programmers, project managers, but also for anyone who wants to visualize their ideas. Its ease of use makes it accessible even to users without previous design experience. The user environment that is created is just a drawing or prototype. It’s not functional, but serves to visualize and plan the design of applications or websites. It can be used to present ideas and test layouts before starting the development of an actual application or site.

This is a good tool for web and mobile designers. They can focus on creativity without technical details taking up their time. Likewise, it can be used by developers for planning application flows and user environments. Project managers can use it for creating flow diagrams and organizational charts. The application is great for presentations. It can also be used in teaching management, informatics, and design.

This is a free program and it’s open-source. It’s easy and flexible to use. Pencil Project is useful for anyone who wants to visually represent their ideas before turning them into real products.

Platform:
Windows, macOS, Linux