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Microsoft Unveils New Design Studio

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the helping-coders-make-things-pretty dept.

shibashaba writes "NewsFactor is reporting that Microsoft has just released a new design studio consisting of the Acrylic Graphic Design, Sparkle Interactive Design and Quartz Web Designer Software. Supposedly the goal is not to compete head to head with the proposed Adobe/Macromedia merger but to turn developers into designers. According to Jupiter Research, The days when a designer worked alone have been traded in for an interactive world in which designers often work hand-in-hand with developers. "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."

2 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft link by pammon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's Microsoft's page about it: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/de fault.aspx

  2. One of the worst products I ever worked on... by tlambert · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of the worst products I ever worked on was one that was "designed" by a "designer" who wouldn't have known "third normal form" if it came up and bit her on the ass and said "Hello, I'm third normal form".

    It was a web-based UI that was "designed" by someone using Visual BASIC as their design tool, and then we had the "opportunity" to try and build the damn thing in Java in a browser-portable way.

    I'd rather walk on broken glass than work with that person again.

    The UI we ended up with bore no relationship to the underlying data organization, and was basically all over the map when it came to unrelated items glommed together. Gee, it was pretty, but it was also totally unusable.

    I'd have to disagree with you - it *completely* matters for a designer to understand what they are designing for; if they don't, the result is going to suck, and suck hard.

    -- Terry