2. A Tour of the UI Library: Your Box of Building Blocks
The UI Library is where you’ll find all the components you need to build your wireframes. To make things easy to find, these elements are organized into helpful categories.
| Category | What You’ll Find Inside (Its Purpose) |
| All | A complete collection of every UI element available in Balsamiq. |
| Assets | A place for custom assets, like images or logos, that you upload to use in your project. |
| Big | Large-scale elements like placeholders, device frames (iPhone, iPad), and browser windows. |
| Buttons | All types of interactive buttons, such as action buttons and checkboxes. |
| Common | Frequently used shapes and controls for denoting common user interactions. |
| Containers | Elements that hold other content, like windows, browsers, and field sets. |
| Forms | Every UI control you would need to build a form. |
| Icons | A huge collection of icons to visually represent actions, such as the classic floppy disk icon for ‘Save’. |
| iOS | UI controls that are specific to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. |
| Layout | Components for structuring a page, such as accordions and tab bars. |
| Markup | Tools for annotating your wireframes, like comment boxes, and callouts to show how different elements connect. |
| Media | UI controls for representing media elements like images or sound players. |
| Symbols | Reusable components you can create to speed up your workflow for common elements. |
| Text | All controls related to text, including paragraphs, link bars, and combo boxes. |
With this vast library of building blocks at your fingertips, you can drag and drop them onto the main wireframe area to bring your ideas to life.