A guide for non-designers who want to learn the basics of wireframing—perfect for anyone looking to bring their digital projects to life.

Digital products go through cycles of expansion and simplification. Today we focus on the “adult life” phase, which is where Balsamiq Wireframes is right now.

We believe Product Managers can and should wireframe! All you need are some ground rules for doing it, and good communication with your teammates. Here's how.

A set of simple ground rules for product designers and other stakeholders in software projects, for a long-lasting, smooth, and effective collaboration.

Rigorous user research isn’t always possible. This talk for Smashing Meets explains how we adapted the theory to make it work in our particular world.

Product roadmaps vary a lot depending on the size of your company. We try to keep ours simple.

Our traditional recap of what we did in 2021, and our plans for 2022!

User Research and Development are team sports. We go over the organization and processes our remote-first teams have in place to build Balsamiq Wireframes.

Quarterly roadmap meetings are great for making big plans, but how can we make much-needed smaller, everyday decisions? We use PRBs!

Designing a Sign-Up flow for a web app is much harder than you’d think. It requires a balance between usability and security, with a sprinkle of marketing on top.

Peldi and Asia discuss why and how founders should overcome the discomfort of talking to their customers and how to prepare for conducting great interviews.

A detailed recap of what we achieved in 2020, and a quick look at what's to come in 2021!

Balsamiq now integrates with Trello! Link your wireframes to Trello cards with just a few clicks, and collaborate without friction!

A behind-the-scenes look at some of the tools we built to help Balsamiq run smoothly, and the motivations behind building them. It’s educational and fun!

Anil and Jess chat about the lessons and challenges of building a user research team from scratch, qualitative methods, and the value of talking to customers.

Features, bugs, chores: a behind-the-scenes look at how we decide to work on. Because no matter how big your product team is, there’s only so much you can push.

The big rewrite is finally complete. Revenue grew over 11%. Read the recap of 2019, and take a quick look at what's to come in 2020!

Wireframes for Desktop is SO CLOSE to being release-quality. Come try it out, and help us get over the finish line!

Announcing myBalsamiq's End Of Life date: 1 December 2020.

Beta programs are a common way to reduce risk when shipping new software. We like to take it a step further and run Gammas, as well! Less stress, more quality.

Have you ever wanted to talk to us in person? Would you like advice on your career, or software company? We are running a new program, which we're calling... the Balsamiq Office Hours!

A look back at Balsamiq's 2018 achievements and results.

The Balsamiq family keeps on growing! Join us in welcoming our 3 new team members Amanda, Kendra, and Billy.

We are starting a new tradition at Balsamiq; monthly release notes. This month, July 2018, most of the work was behind the scenes.

Welcome two new employees to the Balsamiq family: Laura Lei and Julia DeBari. Laura Lei is our Digital Artist and Julia is our first Design Educator.

We have donated more than 10,000 licenses over the last 8 years. Here is why, and a kind invitation to other software companies to do the same.

It’s that time of the year when we recap the past year and share with you our plans for the next 12 months. Subscribe to the newsletter for more info!

Introducing Balsamiq Cloud, our brand new solution for fast, collaborative user interface wireframing. We’re really proud of it! ☺️

We're excited to introduce to you the two newest members of the Balsamiq family, Ali Servet Donmez and Alasdair Manson!

“Revenue, head count, PR, and quality--if one gets ahead of the others, you’re screwed.” An oldie, but goodie we have referred to since 2008!

We’re starting to ship updated versions of all of our products that include our new, web-native Balsamiq Wireframes editor!

Balsamiq Wireframes is our next generation low-fidelity, collaborative wireframing editor. It's better in every way, and about to be released.

Zenware means zen software. Here is a short list of tools that help you get focused, achieve the ultra-productive cognitive state known as flow, and stay there.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you four new members of the Balsamiq family! We are also hiring 4 more people over the next few months!

Every company has a natural size. Answer this question and you’ll find out what kind of company you should build and how to grow it.

Our vacation policy was: Take some. But we noticed that some employees weren’t taking enough. Now our policy is: Take at least 20 days off a year.

We continue to truck along nicely, executing on our vision. 2016 was yet another record year for us, with sales almost reaching $6.6 million.

Hello friends! We're excited to introduce to you the two newest members of the Balsamiq family, Stefano Gozzi and Philip Nittenberg!

Hello friends of Balsamiq! Another month, another exciting release! Improved Material Design Support! We have added some controls and properties to make it easier to create designs inspired by Material Design. A new g...

Hello, friends of Balsamiq! Our not-so-little-anymore team keeps on growing! Today I would like to introduce to you our two new team members: Drew Lafferty and Liz Green! Drew Lafferty Drew is a jack-of-all-trades Deve...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! Today's release is bigger than our usual ones, so we're switching the version number from 3.3 to 3.4 for it. Let's see what's new and improved: (Optional) Manual Save One of the most daring...

Hello again friends of Balsamiq! Peldi here with our traditional 'state of the union' end-of-year report. You can find previous editions here: 2008, 2009, 2013, and 2014. As usual, this is going to be a very long pos...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! We're very excited to share today's release with you. It's a big one, so we're switching the minor number from 3.2 to 3.3 for it. Make yourself comfortable and let's dive in! 🙂 A New Way to...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It is my great pleasure to introduce to you three new members of the Balsamiq family today. Brendan Saricks Brendan is the guy in your family that everyone calls when their computer doesn'...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! Today we have something so exciting to share that we're switching the version number from 3.1 to 3.2 for it. Check it out! Two new control types: Block and Line of Text Our sweet spot is the...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It's only been three weeks since the last release, but A LOT has happened since. In fact, this is such a big update that we're calling it 3.1! Don't worry, this is a free update for existing c...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! 🙂 Today is a big day for us: after almost a year of heads-down work, we are releasing the biggest update in our little company's history: Balsamiq Mockups 3.

Hello? Is anyone still reading this? After being quiet for 10 months, we can understand if you thought we had sent our developers on a long vacation somewhere... 😉 Well, we didn't. In fact, we have been working really...

Hello again friends of Balsamiq! Peldi here with our traditional 'state of the union' end-of-year report. You can find previous editions here: 2008, 2009 and 2013. As usual, this is going to be a very long post. Summa...

Over time, I have learned to consider the first wireframes of any new idea to be 'version 3', meaning that, because of how our brain works, we usually tend to put way too many details in them. So, once the wireframes ar...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! As 2013 comes to an end, it's time to revive an old tradition (2008, 2009) and look back at all that we have achieved this year. TL;DR: We continue to truck along nicely, growing organically....

With the SuperMoon shining upon us, the friends who make up Balsamiq met in San Francisco to celebrate our company's 5th birthday. Our team is scattered around Europe and the States, so being together is rare and deliber...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! Our little team is growing again! This time I'd like you to join me in welcoming my good friend and old college buddy Salvatore 'Sax' Cammarata to the Balsamiq family. Sax will take on the...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Andrea Serra, the latest member of the Balsamiq family. Andrea is a client-side developer who will be focussing on our myBalsamiq wireframe edito...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! Another week, another piece of good news. No, two! 🙂 We hired a new team member to speed up our software development, and we partnered with a long term friend's company to improve our softwa...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It is with great pleasure that I can announce today that Balsamiq has entered a long-term partnership with Aramis B.V., a Dutch software development company owned by my long-time friend Stefan...

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Anna Mariotti, the latest addition to the Balsamiq family. Anna's main job is to ensure that our growing Italian company runs smoothly. She's going to work on purchasing, m...

At Balsamiq, we're big fans of open-source software. We open source parts of our code and tools on GitHub, in case you want to take a look.

It is with great excitement and pride that I present to you our biggest release yet: Balsamiq Mockups 2.2! The new release sports an updated look and feel, and a new 'wireframe' skin for you to use in your mockups, and l...

My suitcases are not yet unpacked because I have Balsamiq Jetlag Syndrome (BJS). Luis defines that as 'A complication of ordinary jetlag, where the subject is kept awake by the steady stream of inspiration resulting from...

Hello friends. For the second time in the history of Balsamiq, I write you today to apologize for our mistakes. This morning we started what was supposed to be a routine myBalsamiq update. We couldn't do a zero-downtim...

Hello friends of Balsamiq! It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the newest member of the Balsamiq family: Florian Brauer! We first met Florian in July last year, when he posted quite a few detailed and accurat...

Since we have no plan on ever selling the company or going public, employee stock option programs never made sense to us. Instead, we set up a quarterly profit sharing program, so that employees could benefit from the...

This post is part of a series about our VERY FEW company policies. Read this intro post for some context. Given that we have different people all around the world and that we are 100% open books internally (i.e. everyo...

This post is part of a series about our VERY FEW company policies. Read this intro post for some context. At Balsamiq, we don't have deadlines. Ever. It seems so natural to me, but I sometimes get reminded of how unco...

I'm not a fan of policies. In fact, the tiny little essay on how policies are bad from Rework is my favorite of the whole book. It's called 'Don’t scar on the first cut' - worth buying the book just for that four-paragra...

Hello friends, we hope you're having a great summer! Today's release marks the end of an era for us, as we introduce our very own font. It's a big enough change that we feel it warrants a new minor version update: 1.5...

One of the hardest things about working with my beloved distributed team (aka balsamici*) is our not being able to see each other in person more often. Just once a year are we together in the same time zone, in the same...

Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since our last blog post, my apologies. We've been crazy busy with lots and lots of new customers and working on our web app. It's all fun, but the blogs have been suffering a bi...

After months and months of work, we are ecstatic to finally be able to release Mockups 2.0 into the world. The main feature of Mockups 2.0 is what we pre-announced last week, the ability to reuse groups of controls as t...

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Paolo Ottanà, the newest member of team Balsamiq. Paolo will be working out of our Bologna office, helping us with lots and lots of different programming tasks. His main re...

Hello friends, long time no see! So sorry for not keeping you in the loop more about what's going on in Balsamiq-land. Although it might seem like we're not doing anything from the outside, the last few weeks have been...

Hello friends! Wow, it's been 4 weeks since our last update, that's probably the longest we've EVER gone without releasing! I hope you'll agree it was worth the wait. This is one of our biggest updates since we started...

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great easter/spring break and are fully recharged for the months ahead. This is the first blog post from our new web server, so if you find any broken links or anything that doesn't...

I can barely contain my excitement as I type this, so I'll get right to it: Michael Angeles, the man behind Konigi and one of the people I look up to the most in our industry, has agreed to join Balsamiq. His job tit...

Wow. Just wow. It's hard for me to believe how much has happened in Balsamiq-land in 2009. I feel like a completely different person than when I wrote the 'A Look back at 2008' post, just 12 months ago. In a way, I am...

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2009 and our plans for 2010. We did this last year as well, it's becoming somewhat of a tradition! 😉 By the way, thanks so much for all the support and nice wo...

Hi friends. So I made a big mistake today. No, I made a few. I was so excited about the new pan feature that I decided to release it without testing it properly. Not only, I also ran out the door right after the build...

Last week we participated in the Atlassian Summit, Atlassian's first worldwide conference and Balsamiq's first foray in being a conference sponsor. Below is an account on what happened and what we learned from the exper...

Lots to share, but here's the main announcement: You can now link Mockups together! Simple as that. 🙂 At the moment the feature only works in Mockups for Desktop, but with your help I plan on bringing it to the Conflu...

Feeling a great mixture of excitement, pride and trepidation, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Marco Botton, Balsamiq's first full time employee. How did this happen? A little bit of history Warning: the following...

Hi there, just a quick post to record the fact that today marked the 2000th customer of Balsamiq Mockups. That's 2000 monetary transactions, the number of Mockups users could easily be double that - lots of people buy v...

This is part one of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009. First, a few numbers about 2008: days in business: 196 - that's 6 months and 13 days, or 28 weeks. See my June 19th launch post her...

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009. So 2008 was great, no, it was beyond great. I quit my job, moved to Italy and started Balsamiq Studios LLC, my first company. It wen...

I am extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Balsamiq Mockups version 1.5. This is a FREE upgrade for all Mockups versions. Download links: Mockups for Desktop, for Confluence, for JIRA and for XWik...

I feel a bit sheepish posting this since I don't want to come across as bragging, but a promise is a promise, so here it goes... I just recently surpassed $100,000 of revenue. Balsamiq has been in business for less than...

The following is a story that I told many people already, but didn't think was interesting enough to put on my blog until a certain Tamales Princess I know practically forced me to write to 😉 so here it is. A little bac...

I know I know, it might not be the smartest thing to release a new product every day, but I'm too excited to sit on this one. The news: if you are running a free JIRA 3.13 Personal License, you can now make it even bett...

I just sold a license to my 500th customer! That's a much bigger number that I expected to reach in such a short time (it's been less than 3 and 1/2 months since I launched), but so far I don't feel that it has impacted...

I am thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Balsamiq Mockups for JIRA, the latest version of Balsamiq Mockups. You can download it, test it and if you wish, buy it for just $799. Quick and dirty Screencast...

The huge amount of attention that my 'Profitable, in 3 weeks!' post has received so far tells me that there's a thirst for financial results of small bootstrapped startups in the interweb, so here's another milestone rep...

The news: Mockups version 1.1 is available as of today as a free upgrade to all customers. What to do: go get it! For your desktop and for Atlassian Confluence. Licensed users will NOT need to re-enter your license infor...

Sorry for tooting my own horn here but I think my current and potential customers will be happy to hear that business is going well, so here it goes. Exactly 3 weeks after launching, Balsamiq Studios LLC is now profitab...

A full 16 days after the release of Mockups 1.0, an alpha version of 1.1 is ready for testing for the braves amongst you. 🙂 Version 1.1 is scheduled to be released on July 21st, and it will be a free upgrade to custome...

Hi everyone. It's been now a full week since my official launch, and my what a ride it has been! I know the adventure is just getting started, but I wanted to put together and share some quick stats from Balsamiq's 1st w...

I want to write a 'launch post-mortem' entry tomorrow, but for now I wanted to encourage you to go download the new release of Mockups, as there are some pretty cool enhancements and bug fixes all around: Bugs Fixed UI...

What's happening: Balsamiq Studios LLC is launching today. What it means to you: Balsamiq Mockups 1.0 is now officially for sale, both as a Confluence plugin and as a desktop application. The website copy has been tw...

So I uploaded Mockups for Desktop to the Adobe AIR marketplace on Monday, and already it's showing 102 downloads of the demo app, plus my entry page is generating a bunch of traffic for my site. Not bad for a product th...

One of the reasons I have this blog is to help others like me who might be starting a software company on their own (micro-ISV-ers?). So if you are like me and know nothing about legal matters and get a knot in your stom...

I have sent a link to an alpha build of Balsamiq Mockups to two of my most trusted advisors. I am so nervous, this will be the first time someone other than me and my wife see the product and get to play with it. It's e...

So no-one liked WOPStudio, I was never really in love with it either. Plus someone pointed out that WOP doesn't really have very good connotations, given that I'm Italian and all. I had no idea! Anyways, after much thin...

I decided on a company name today: WopStudio. Wop is for Web Office Plugins, but you don't have to remember that...just remember wopstudio, or wopstudio.com! 🙂 I like the word 'studio' for a number of reasons: it has a...

A trick to add backgrounds to any control in Balsamiq.

A neat trick to add a blank row to two common Balsamiq controls.

A neat trick to keep labels in Balsamiq wireframes aligned even after editing them.

Speed up your Balsamiq selection skills with this neat trick.

The best wireframes come out of several rounds of feedback and iteration. Let’s explore how to do so in Balsamiq Cloud.

A neat trick to simulate a disabled state to any control in Balsamiq.

Learn the 3 shortcuts to hide most of the Balsamiq UI, so you can focus on your content.

Starting a digital project from an existing UI — maybe even of a different product! — can save you time.

Need more space for your text? CTRL+Enter your way to spaciousness!

A hidden feature of Balsamiq: built-in lorem ipsum text!

A trick to add multiple selection to any control in Balsamiq.

Wireframe at the speed of thought using these hidden Balsamiq features.

How to make controls uniform in size in Balsamiq.

A neat trick to quickly re-arrange the layering of your Balsamiq wireframes controls.

Being able to quickly transform controls into different ones is one of Balsamiq' hidden gems!

How to quickly add text to controls after adding them via search in Balsamiq.

How to zoom all your Balsamiq wireframes at once by double-clicking on the zoom icons.