tldraw - My go-to whiteboarding webapp
Sometimes you just need a quick and easy webapp for throwing something together. For me, when I work on projects, I like to doodle up a wireframe of sorts. I could use more advanced software for this, I'm sure I'll eventually find something that can fit in with my usage of Obsidian, but I quite like tldraw nonetheless. It's a simple whiteboarding site that I use to throw together quick diagrams for myself.
How do I use tldraw?
People who know me well know that I work on personal projects regularly. I'm naturally interested in pushing myself, challenging what I know and trying to work on more and more complicated things. Given that, I am often pushing myself into starting a new project, or continuing an old project. Today, I'll show you a basic wireframe I made in tldraw that represents a project I'm working on called Cosgroups. It's in a very infant stage, so this article just focuses on how I use tldraw to get myself a starting point.
The above is a basic wireframe I threw together in tldraw for the purpose of my new Cosgroups app that I started working on over the weekend. All you need to know about the project is it's a web view for showcasing cosplays, groups of cosplayers and their creations. Given that, I thought I'd figure out what are the main eight views I needed to throw together. I decided to draw out a basic wireframe and see what it looks like - and honestly, seeing how much of a pattern there was to the design, I was glad I did.
Like many drawing tools, tldraw is intuitive and simple. There's a button for making shapes, a free-draw button, arrows, inserting assets (pictures, gifs, videos etc). You can change the line style (solid, dotted, etc), the fill style (solid, dotted, etc), the colours (this is limited, but there's a nice enough selection of colours). Once everything's said and done, you can choose to export the file as a png, or other useful formats.
That was all I wanted to talk about today, not a big topic, but one that I think most web developers have waded into. I could use Figma, or any other more professional tool, but I'm more of a coder than I am a true designer. I kind of expect my projects to be finished when they're functional, then if someone gets interested in my work and wanted to contribute in some way from a design perspective, then we could have a chat, see if our values align and go from there.
But that's it for this week! Thanks for reading, much love and happy whiteboarding folks! Timlah