HomePortfolioSILKWeb

a website by Francis Li

SILK is a user interface design tool developed by James Landay as his dissertation project while a student at Carnegie-Mellon University. SILK allows designers to sketch user interface designs using a computer with a pen, interact with those sketches as if they were real programs, and then generate program code for the user interface.

I worked with James, currently a professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley, and his graduate student Mark Newman as an undergraduate researcher to extend the implementation of SILK such that it could support web page design and generate HTML (SILKWeb).

Although successful in implementing the extensions, recognizing the unique work practices of web site designers vs. traditional GUI designers prompted a complete redesign of the SILKWeb tool by Mark Newman. This redesign was later completed as the DENIM project (which I was not directly involved with).

Presentations:

• SILKWeb: A Sketching Tool for Informal Web Page Design
  Microsoft PowerPoint. Presented at NEC C&C Research Lab, July 9, 1998.

External sites:

• DENIM and SILK Project Homepage

Figure 1. Web form sketched using SILKWeb

Figure 2. HTML generated from the sketch viewed in the browser