Bringing Your Big Idea to Life

Do you have an concept for a website or app you want to bring to life but are stuck trying to explain the idea over simply showing it to people? Truly seeing an idea is believing and taking a concept to a prototype is much easier than you think.

Peter Denton, a product manager at Cheezburger, has worked in several start-ups bringing ideas to life through workable prototypes. By teaching the steps to developing a working prototype, students will be empowered to transform their idea into a functioning prototype to show potential partners, investors, and customers for feedback. This 7-week class will include overviews and interactive workshops around:

Week 1

• Defining the concept & Developing wireframes
Understanding how to organize your thoughts into a product outline. How do ideas translate
to features and how you present them to users?
How can you expose flaws in your logic by sketching out the user experience.

• Transforming the wireframes into a design
Understand the basics of visual design and Photoshop. Learn how to build a visual design from
a your wireframes and convey your brand.

• Understanding how websites and applications work
Understand how the Internet websites and applications work. Understand how the Client Side, Server Side, Javascript, and database work in harmony.

• Transforming the design into HTML
Learning the basics of HTML and CSS and how to transform a visual design into a webpage.
Learn how to make a simple page

• Building a simple form to submit data into a database
Data is essential to a vision. Understanding how it gets added to a database is fundamental.
Learn how to build a form to accept data from potential users to bring the information of your
product to life.

• Presenting data from a database
Learn how to access and present data from a database onto a webpage or device. Understand how
to access data, write a database query, and pass that information into an application.

• Tying it all together into an application
Review the principles learned during the class and look at the finished prototype, review
other applications, and review the steps towards building a successful prototype.