Is WPF & SilverLight Design worth learning

Question

Hi,

For a developpeur who as to do a project with WPF or Silverlight (xaml code), is it trial to learn some design (basics) and to handle blend? Beacause in France there isn't much blend professional (compare to photoshop users) and the price/day of a blend designer is very high.

What I am sure is there i ain't no artist, but it could be interesting/fun to learn something that different then pure code. So my question is mainly for designer or developpers that had to learn some design, is it that hard for a custom design?

Answer 1

The principle of design are not difficult to learn but they're not always easy to put into practice and that's why it's considered an art rather than a skill. Certainly WPF/Silverlight is a designers dream as far as desktop UI is concerned since it's VERY flexible so you'll find few restrictions on what is possible when compared to other technologies. Blend works well with them too and it's not that tough to learn.

To start learning design as a developer, i'd suggest you take in as much material as possible and pratice,..a LOT. Read design blogs like the ones here and read plenty of books. Some good starter books are The Non Designers Design Book, The Design Of Everyday Things and Don't Make Me Think. I know they all really help when i started to look into UI and interaction design.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

A great way to find your way in the design world is the Principles of Design Series on Microsoft Showcase. These videos explain things like Rythm and Unity.

There are a lot of other videos that should help to find your way around Expression Blend and Silverlight.

One thing that works for me all the time is to look what others do and use that for inspiration in you own design. Just google-image or bing-image for you are designing or see if it is in the Infragistics UX explorer.

Answer 3

I understand your question as I went through the same thing. I've done plenty of web sites over the years, but I never felt as though they had the "zing" a good graphic artist could provide. Because of this, I had concluded some time ago that to really take my skills to the next level I had to learn at least some graphic design, but I never did anything about it.

That changed when I started learning WPF. I quickly decided that I needed to learn some basics, especially when I started using Blend which was a whole new world after living in Visual Studio for so long.

To jump start my graphic artist education, I took an introductory course at our local community college. It was worth every penny: I was exposed to principles of design and some key software products like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Understanding them made Blend finally "click" for me. The experience has proven invaluable to me as a WPF developer, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in UI work.