The guys over at the Design Commission [@designcom on Twitter] have gone and made an iPhone Stencil Kit as a follow up to their popular Website Stencil Kit. Initially they had 1,000 stencils made for sale, but due to popular demand, have since made many many more. I received mine on Monday and have started using it for an iPhone App that I am currently developing.

The details:

The kit costs $16.95 + shipping&handling [Domestic shipping is $4.95 and international is $15] and includes:

• One iPhone UI Stencil
• Zebra mechanical pencil
• 2 Design Commission stickers
• Downloadable .PDF letter-sized paper template

Using the kit

The kit is really created with the intended use of the printable PDF templates. It doesn't have a full iPhone body stencil to draw your iPhone on a separate paper. It does do a decent job at half-skeleton of one though. You'll have to fill in some missing lines yourself. The notable missing seems to be status bar, the section with the wifi, 3G, and battery icon area, not being stenciled. The other small problem I ran into so far is that it's made of stainless steel. I can't see what's under the stencil as I try to approximate the needed spacing between Tab Bar icons. Although, I do need to keep in mind that it's made of stainless steel to be more durable than plastic and also that I'm making prototype designs to show clients, not finalized work.

Overall, the only real downside I can see, is that you really do have to use a mechanical pencil. The one provided by Design Commission, is a Zebra, which are extremely good. But, if you use a regular #2 pencil, you will likely run into some trouble on some of the smaller stencil bits, requiring you to constantly sharpen your pencil tip. Other than that, it's a really great addition to any iPhone developer's arsenal.

Now of course, this is all for paper prototyping. And if you have been following Stanford's CS193P iPhone Programming class on iTunes, Steve Marmon discussed the importance of paper prototyping for iPhone App design in his lecture How to Build an iPhone App that Doesn't Suck [iTunes link.]

If you prefer digital prototyping, Balsamiq has updated their software to include iPhone designing, and in my previous post: 5 Free iPhone Resources, I have links to Omnigraffle, Adobe Fireworks, Photoshop, and Illustrator stencil kits.

[nggallery id=15]