Microsoft Unveils New Design Studio

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."

Comments

Yeah, right

[Pig Hogger]

This is just as stupid as making designers work as software developpers.

They can't be two more opposed jobs in a game shop than designers and developpers.

Heck, I've been doing tech support for a design shop with both graphic and industrial designers, and those people have totally no clue in what makes a computer tick.

Re:Yeah, right

[AKAImBatman]

Parent is not a troll. He's correct. You should always attempt to utilize people as best as possible. Now you can send your developers to design school and *hope* they pick up some natural talent for artistry, or you can have your art team and your development team work together, hand in hand at what they're both best at.

Sure, it's more difficult to manage a team as opposed to a few key developers, but consider the fact that a developer is still only one person. If he has to handle every phase of the implementation by himself, he's never going to get the project done. The name of the game is divide and conquer. What better way than to divide along the lines of competence?

I honestly don't understand this industry practice of thinking management is irrelevent just because we have technology. A well managed project will keep the team members close together and the project on schedule. A poorly managed project will fall apart as team members throw blame at each other because no one knows what to do, or everyone is vieing for a leadership position.

Want your project to succeed? Manage it, and manage it well.

Re:Yeah, right

[Goyuix]

People are really missing the point on this - it isn't about turning developers into designers, or designers into developers - it is about allowing them to fully leverage each others strengths. The Expression stuff can make use of the libraries developers provide, or they can have the GUI stub out methods and events that the developers can tie back in with the business logic etc...

Granted, as a developer who is often forced into a designer role as well, I look forward to enhaced toolsets. Maybe not from MS, but you can bet that the competitors (and quasi non-competitors like OSS) will release newer / updated tools to provide similar or even better functionality down the road. Not to nit-pick, but it really doesn't matter for a designer to understand the inner tickings of a computer (and to some extent a developer, though they will be much better off if they do). Just like you probably don't have nearly the trained eye nor layout skills that the designers do for their artwork. Strengths and Toolsets. This is what MS is trying to bridge, or in market-speak - creating "synergies"!!!

(oh boy I have a bright future in marketing I am afraid...)

Re:Yeah, right

[Nefarious Wheel]

But... I iz a code artiste !

Re:Yeah, right

[bedroll]

I think that the point is really this: Microsoft likes to make technologies that do 75% as well as the next but take 50% of the training to think you understand them. That entry point is the key and the quality level is the punch. If you keep your entry point down the managers will believe they're dealing with better ROI (their term, not mine) and they are more likely to look at the solution. If they see that the quality is at least at 75% of other solutions then they'll believe that they can engineer around that. The problem is that tend to hire employees who are willing to work for cheap because they don't have the expertise to better design their solutions.

This all means that Microsoft can put together a case study of companies that manage to get lucky and make this all work then represent that as the norm. They then put together a survey that says that other implementations have a higher TCO (again, their term, not mine) due largely to higher salaries. Then the real motivation is made clear: They don't care about the quality of software that is developed, they care that managers see a better value in paying them instead of paying higher wages for more skilled employees.

Making things easier for the developer to become the designer is the next logical step. This means you buy more of their software with the thinking that you don't have to hire another skilled worker.

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding!

I develop sometimes, and sometimes I have to be the UI designer too.

I can really appreciate and "see" a good design. I love the Mac for instance. I try really hard to make my UIs simple and clean and intuitive. But it takes a lot of effort. I'm really not good at it. I just tweak and hammer and edit all day until it looks like something a good design team made (like 37signals, I copy their UIs all the time). I go by trial and error, not by any deep understanding of what I'm doing.

What I need is training, NOT a shiny new tool. That's like giving a designer a copy of Emacs and saying, "heres a good tool, write a giant Lisp system". Well actually what I need is a good designer to work with... because I can't do all this stuff myself.

Microsoft needs to stop dumbing down everything, and stop giving people more and more "easy wizard tools". This doesn't lead to better software, it leads to 1) more software, most of it crappy, and 2) more money for Microsoft.

I'd like to see more effort being made at teaching foundation knowledge and basic *understanding* of what it means to design a database, write a program, or design a UI. More idiot-proof tools aren't what we need. Hell, I do my UI design with paper and pencil and then Vim.

Oh well. And people wonder why software crashes all the time, has security bugs, and needs to be rewritten every 18 months!

Re:Yeah, right

[cookie_cutter]

I honestly don't understand this industry practice of thinking management is irrelevent just because we have technology.

It's easy to understand why people think that. It's because most people's experience with management is highly conducive to that belief.

Re:Yeah, right

[MyDixieWrecked]

I agree 100%.

from the summary: "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."

the legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market is that so many developers think their designers. And so many people who have absolutely no concept of good design think their designers.

I've seen this first hand, far too often. Working in the digital prepress field, the ratio of jobs coming in from design firms/ professional designers compared to Janine working out of her basement on her shiny new dell has radically shifted.

We're stuck getting low res RGB Jpegs placed in powerpoint, RGB blacks that convert to horrible CMYK and customers who don't know what resolution is and don't even own photoshop.

We've even received the occasional paintshop pro file. the guy was a 19 year old kid who was trying to have business cards and mailers printed to advertise his webgraphics talents. After talking to him for 5 minutes, I realized he had no clue. No idea what resolution was. No idea what the difference between CMYK and RGB was. He also thought that PaintshopPro did everything that photoshop did. I was ready to kick his ass.

but now I'm getting off my point...

my point: The problem with the industry is lack of design skills with the designers, whether they're developer-gone-designer or designers with no skills.

Re:Yeah, right

[linuxfanatic1024]

They're. I cannot even read the rest of your comment because of that error, think about that next time you write a rant.

Notice how this post contains a comma splice error, putting a comma where a semicolon, or period, should be used instead....

Please think about your own use of language before correcting someone else's.

And, if you cannot read a post with a typo in it, you must be very picky. ::eyeroll::

Re:Yeah, right

[nidarus]

Ah, you keep mentioning RGB/CMYK and resolution like they're some kind of arcane knowledge only Real Designers know. To me, it's something you learn in a 28-day Photoshop course.

Design is about knowing stuff like color theory, composition, typography, and using them properly. I should note that while they're a dying breed, some great designers don't really know how to use the computer at all (they have underpaid geeks that do it for them).

Anyway: knowing about RGB/CMYK and resolution and believing in the undisputed superiority of Photoshop are not "design skills", just as knowing TeX isn't a "math skill". Actually making a good design (even in PaintshopPro) is a completely different thing.

Uh...

[the_skywise]

""Microsoft is second to none in terms of developing tools that fill a gap," he said. An example of the company's ability to redefine a market is the original Outlook software introduced in the mid-1990s. At the time, there was a hodgepodge of contact management and e-mail software, said Wilcox, but no one had combined the two.

Microsoft perceived a problem and an opportunity. "And you can't truly say that Outlook is an e-mail program. They actually redefined the market."

Lotus Notes?

Re:Uh...

[AKAImBatman]

"And you can't truly say that Outlook is an e-mail program. They actually redefined the market."

They are right. After all, they managed to integrate a calendar and address book into an email application. It's no longer just email, it's email and calendaring! See the difference? (No, I don't either.)

Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is useful only because it centralizes more than just the email. Scheduling and the ability to look up people in your company are both important features. The thing I don't understand is, where the heck is the competition? I mean, you're looking at a few special folders that Outlook interprets as "Calendar" and "Address Book" in an IMAP-type interface. Why can't anyone else do this? Always kind of boggled my mind.

And no, Lotus Notes doesn't count. LN isn't email, it's an automatic, self-corrupting database that happens to support email. A bit like EMACS is a complete LISP environment that happens to support text editing. ;-)

Re:Uh...

[IonSwitz]

Lotus Notes? Yeah, too bad it hasn't evolved since 1995. ;-) Notes is, in my opinion, the worst piece of software to survive this long in that mail/contact management area. The only worse piece of software I've used in that respect was First Class, and even that had the advantage that I could telnet to the server and hence access my Email through a command prompt. Yay. :-) But, yeah, you're most likely right in saying that Outlook wasn't the first (and certainly not the greatest) back then.

Re:Uh...

[AKAImBatman]

I'm not saying that it's not useful. I'm saying that:

1. It's not really "email redefined", it's "email with calendaring bundled".

2. It's so stupidly simple, I don't understand why no one at least copies it. Hell, it wouldn't be that hard to come up with something with more powerful features. (e.g. Better email searching, searchable address book, labels vs. folders, smart calendar that can helpfully generate reports to help you plan your day, etc.)

It just amazes me that Microsoft has managed to get a strangehold on the email market with a fairly straight-forward produce, and the only industry response is a new version of Lotus Notes. Am I missing something here?

Re:Uh...

[s.fontinalis]

It's power is a major reason for it's acceptance at some medium to large size companies. I'm convinced there were whole flotillas of flotsam managers at a previous employer whose lone skills were an in depth command of Outlook meeting scheduling arcana, and the ability to create moving graphs in powerpoint. Well that and a desire to live like lampreys on their bosses ass.

Re:Uh...

[dedazo]

Well... maybe, just maybe it's not so simple as you think it is, mmm?

I mean, Photoshop is also stupidly simple, right? It's amazing no one has managed to clone it successfully.

And Quark/PageMaker/InDesign? Stupidly simple!

CorelDraw? Illustrator? *cue Howard Dean scream* STUPIDLY SIMPLE!!!

Seriously, you oughta try and look at things from another angle. Sometimes it helps.

Finally!

[pwnage]

Microsoft has provided a solution which will magically change my crappy looking stick-figure graphics into polished works of art.

My new plan:

1. Create a crappy-looking web application.
2. Run it through Microsoft's new design software.
3. ???
4. Profit!

Re:Finally!

[pwnage]

I'm only half-kidding. My experience after managing both in this industry for close to a decade is that most really good coders are poor designers, and most really good designers are poor coders (this is my experience and as such I don't mean to generalize -- YMMV).

While both skills are creative endeavors, they are truly different disciplines. There's only a handful of developers that I've worked with that have truly been able to bridge both talents successfully.

Seriously -- you can't fit a square peg in a round hole. Trying to turn logical artists into visual artists is likely to produce just as many terrible looking applications -- they'll just be crappy in a 3-D, aqua-ripoff sort of way.

Re:Finally!

[AKAImBatman]

Although you will find a lot of people who are both musicians and programmers.

It comes down to structure. Programming is all about elegence in structure. The more structured your code is, the better it is. The more you look for elegent solutions rather than sloppy hacks, the nicer your code looks. (And gets Ooos and Ahhs of approval from your cow-orkers.)

The visual arts have a lot to do with blasting emotion onto the canvas in a fluid way. Programmers don't do "fluid", they do structure. Thus a programmer will tend to give you something utterly sterile like Motif or Java Look and Feel. The only one who will appreciate it is a programmer. Yet an artist will create something like Quartz with rounded edges, flowing colors, and other aestehtics designed to communicate something on a more primal level.

Now when you get to music, structure again begins to rule. There are very specific models for producing music, and many a structured thinker tends to find a way to unconciously communicate through that structure. If you fail to maintain certain structures, it will no longer sound like music. Rather, it will sound like a bad jam session done in somebody's garage.

While sterotypes are always dangerous, I think you'll find that the stronger artists have a talent or strong appreciation for poetry. Poetry may offer them an outlet to express their emotions with only a minimum of structure standing in their way. And the best part about poetic structure is that new structures can be formed based on what sounds good to the ear. You aren't constrained to a few choices in meter, note length, or any other structures imposed on music. It's all optional.

That's my opinion, anyway. :-)

Re:Finally!

[sammy baby]

The visual arts have a lot to do with blasting emotion onto the canvas in a fluid way.

Right, which is why you have crazed hooligans like Ansel Adams, who were all about blasting emotions onto negatives, and had no interest in structure.

(That is to say: I find your hypothesis wanting. ;) )

talk like a ninja day!

[NTiOzymandias]

OMG QUARTZ!!!! Do your stuff Apple lawsuit ninjas!

*cue myriad legions of ninjas with briefcases and Apple logos on their masks vaulting over the top of Microsoft headquarters and hacking away at the unsuspecting trademark*

Wha?

[bullitB]

Alright, I'm sorry to be such a Mac user here, but seriously...Mac OS X 10.4 shipped with a graphics development design tool called "Quartz Composer" months ago (and it was announced almost a year before that). Could they really not come up with a more original name?

Re:Wha?

[timeToy]

No, they can't, it's a developer, trained by M$ to be a designer, using the new suite that find this name, and Marketing though it was sounding cool...

Re:Wha?

[jcr]

Quartz Composer isn't really a design tool. It's a bit tricky to describe, you'll just have to use it.

BTW, Apple's been using the "Quartz" name for their graphics library since 10.1 shipped.

-jcr

Riiiiiiight...

[DurendalMac]

"Microsoft is second to none in terms of developing tools that fill a gap" That gap being the cornhole of their poor customers.

Microsoft link

[pammon]

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

Microsofts Borg Design Goal...

[DARKFORCE123]

"Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."

What is that problem again? That Borg Cubes and Spheres aren't sexy enough for you?

Yesh

[ackthpt]

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."

Designers work with dorks, who work with morons, sometimes with halfwits and often under the direction of the clueless.

Good plan, Microsoft, I see you have a solution that fits everyone, once again.

Re:Quartz

[dedazo]

I hope Apple sues over the name Quartz

I hope not, 'quartz' was the codename for DirectShow and the runtime library is still named 'quartz' as well.

Proud Mac user

Good for you.

I Doubt Microsoft's Commitment to Sparkle Motion

[Nova Express]

Sorry. Had to be said. ;-)

And for the confused, read this.

Developers Developers Developers are not Designers

[Anonymous Coward]

... Designers.. Designers!!

One is left brain. One is right brain.

Asking a coder to do artwork is silly.

The Adobe and Macromedia people understand that artsies like to use artsy tools.

The whole idea of getting developers to 'design' is stupid.

what a goal!

[weighn]

Supposedly the goal is [...] to turn developers into designers.

Just like the Visual studio turns designers into developers?

It will take more than Mr. Sparkle to do that!

Looks good.

[IonSwitz]

After recently attending the PDC in Los Angeles, I must say that this seems to be a big step forward. The separation between code and GUI-design/layout is a great step forward. Designing and changing GUIs should not rest on the developer (You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb) but rather on the GUI designer. Also, this separation makes most (maybe all) new Avalon-GUIs skinnable out-of-the-box. How can that be a bad thing? (Granted that we will now be swamped by people doing insane GUIs like never before)

This developer/designer split allows me as a programmer to focus on writing the actual logic code. The designer can then change the GUI-layout at will, without having to involve me in the process at all.

These tools, as far as I saw them presented at the PDC, seem like a good help in that direction. XAML seems very sweet, Avalon looks awesome. I tell you, my friends, this stuff does not suck.

Now, we can return to our scheduled programming of bashing at the Redmond Beast with all the might we care to summon. :-)

Re:Looks good.

[Mikey-San]

After recently attending the PDC in Los Angeles, I must say that this seems to be a big step forward. The separation between code and GUI-design/layout is a great step forward. Designing and changing GUIs should not rest on the developer (You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb) but rather on the GUI designer.

You know, you could've just said "Interface Builder" and saved yourself a bunch of typing.

Re:Looks good.

[iluvcapra]

I must say that this seems to be a big step forward. The separation between code and GUI-design/layout is a great step forward.

I must say MVC is a big step forward. In 1978.

This developer/designer split allows me as a programmer to focus on writing the actual logic code. The designer can then change the GUI-layout at will, without having to involve me in the process at all.

How the hell have you people been programming for the past decade? :( I've only been doing this for a couple years, Cocoa, RoR, php, some C command-line Unix stuff, but I know what to expect from a GUI development platform.

Now, we can return to our scheduled programming of bashing at the Redmond Beast with all the might we care to summon.

Hmmm. Only say it if you mean it. I don't mean to be snarky, but this is the fourth post I've seen commending XAML and Avalon and Vista, and each time the poster doesn't seem to realize that other GUI developers have had these features for decades in some cases. It is good for MS that MS gets its house in order, but these innovations, despite the hundreds of millions they have poured into them, get Windows to where other platforms were in 2000.

Re:Looks good.

[idlake]

You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb

Yes, it is. So, why did Microsoft start doing it in the first place?

These tools, as far as I saw them presented at the PDC, seem like a good help in that direction. XAML seems very sweet, Avalon looks awesome. I tell you, my friends, this stuff does not suck.

What sucks is that Microsoft created the problem in the first place, then made the world suffer with it for more than a decade, and now finally gets around to fixing it, after we pay them another cool several billions of dollars for upgrades. What also sucks is that people like you don't even know what's going on.

Play The Match Game

[craXORjack]

Supposedly the goal is not to compete head to head with the proposed Adobe/Macromedia merger but to turn developers into designers.

Gene Rayburn: I guess that's fair since they've already turned the __________ into __________ !

Paul Linde: _______________________
Betty White:______________________________
Charles Nelson Reilly:_______________________
Fannie Flagg:________________________________

Re:hmmmm

[yuiop]

Dupes?

Before the Microsoft sucks comments begin

[DoubleRing]

I just wanted to point out that the idea is not all to shabby, if not it's suggested implementation. Having a peice of common software that designers and developers (who are separate) can use could reasonably cut some time during the entire process of making some sort of application. I'm not very familiar with the interaction that goes on between devs and designers, but being able to refer to common aspects of a program could help (I don't see how it'd hurt).

I not saying we should deliver trucks of money to Redmond for this, but the idea isn't awful (perhaps an OSS version?)

Re:Yeah, wrong

[biovoid]

I happen to be employed as a designer/developer, at least when I'm not reading Slashdot. I'm a front-end interface developer and I do everything from concept design, graphic design, and animation, through to development and deployment.

Granted, there are better designers and developers than I, as I'm unable to specialise in either, but not many designer/developer teams can create the kind of responsive, intuitive and attractive user experiences that I do. Something goes missing when you start having to communicate your ideas to someone who doesn't understand both sides.

I will agree that people like me are rare however.. Most designers look at me strangely when I start talking about code, and most developers have absolutely no sense of aesthetics or design.

Oh well

[FidelCatsro]

" to turn developers into designers. "

Don't let your Vet perform your dental work and don't let your dentist neuter your pets .

Hmmm

[crawdad62]

So now we have designers in the mix does this mean we'll be seeing a "Azure" Screen Of Death?

Re:Developers Developers Developers are not Design

[jonogibbs]

While certainly for large teams it makes sense for people to specialize, and for you're hard core programmers to not also handle the visual design.

However, I think it's a cop out to claim them to be so totally different and "asking a coder to do artwork is silly".

I work with many people who are excellent coders and who are also excellent designers. In fact, some of the best programmers I know are also artists (painters, photographers or musicians) and can do excellent web and UI design.

So, if you're a coder who can't do art, that's fine. But if you are a coder who can't do art who wants to, don't let these guys discourage you.

And to Microsoft, the more tools the better. Maybe one will actually be good.

One of the worst products I ever worked on...

[tlambert]

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

Re:One of the worst products I ever worked on...

[zootm]

For data-collection apps, perhaps. But chances are these people will have had some training in usability and so forth, and instead of making some mockup in photoshop then relying on developers "translating" it, the idea of these tools are that the designer can just "draw" the interface and have it function, then the developers can just tie into it.

The idea being that developers find it hard to communicate what designers can and cannot do, and the difficulty of their work — now they don't have to. The prototype "design" is also the finished front-end.

This does not, to the best of my knowledge, cover data-collection, web-based front-ends. That's not the same. But as for an interface for a desktop app, it makes a lot of sense, particularly when things are getting to the level where designers have a lot of options as far as the design goes.

So, essentially, what it does is turn designers into proper designers, by giving them a tool that works exactly (give or take) like a design tool, but outputs sensible code, instead of the developer having to act as a proxy.

Not interactive

[johansalk]

Interactive is a poor word choice; the word you want is multidisciplinary.

Re:Developers Developers Developers are not Design

[MoralHazard]

I vote "mis-modded". I think you were trying to be funny. But there is a serious point here, nonetheless. Allow me to retort:

First of all, this "left brain, right brain" thing is just nonsense. Ask a neurologist. There's a popular myth that revolves around separation of brain function into creative and analytical thinking. The problem is that is complete bullshit. If you take a normal brain, there are "creative" centers in both hemispheres, and likewise with analytical skills.

Biology and evolution don't divide skills up into "creative" and "analytical" categories. The binary division of the two is a human conceit--not without its uses, but it has no place in talking about how the brain works.

Now, THAT being said, "left brain" and "right brain" are, regardless of science, common rhetorical devices used to divide people into analytical and creative categories. Lots of people have aptitudes one way or the other, so it's easy to think that you're naturally one or the other, and that's the way God made you, so be it.

But I think that's bullshit, too. I know far too many incredibly creative engineers, architects, and coders--look at www.hackaday.com if you can't think of any you know, yourself. And I know a hell of a lot of artists and musicians who sat down in front of Photoshop or Pro Tools for the first time as said "Ah-ha!" and did brilliant things.

I'll bet that a lot of people discover one particular aptitude early and focus on that, failing to develop other skills. When I was 12, I was about as good of a programmer as I was a piano player or a painter. But since I spent a lot of time coding, guess what, I'm a pretty damn good coder and a shitty piano player. That doesn't mean I couldn't have been a good piano player, just that it takes years to get good.

Comments are still a little thin, but I suspect we're going to hear a lot more people complaining about how coders can design, and designers can't code. I say, right now, fuck that. I know far too many people who bridge the gap, sometimes iat surprising moments. There are smart people, and there are not-so-smart people.

So who knows? Maybe there's something to this idea of "designer-cum-developer". From the tone of the comments, it doesn't seem like anyone's tried it, much.

Newsfactor Confused?

[Eideewt]

Is it just me or did Newsfactor just completely miss the point and then make one up?

Newsfactor says "Microsoft wants to turn developers into designers." They also mention how Microsoft wants to eliminate the role of the designer.

Microsoft says it's to "Facilitate collaboration between designers and developers...." They talk about separating code from UI design and creating a back and forth channel between designers and developers.

I think I'll go with Microsoft's line, since they are actually the ones who wrote the software.

Re:Developers Developers Developers are not Design

[Judge_Fire]

Please stop confusing design with art.

J

Re:Developers Developers Developers are not Design

[utexaspunk]

I think you've got it backward. I think what they're trying to say is Designers!, Designers!, Designers! are Developers! Developers! Developers! too. They've noticed that a good part of the time spent making software is the UI/Designer people who don't usually know how to program trying to direct the programmers, who don't usually know how to design. Programmers hate fiddling with making the UI elements do what the designers want them to do- they'd rather be solving the big problems. If only the designers had a tool for designing UIs that worked like the tools they know and spoke a language that the programmers could do something with...

As with many other disciplines...

[mi]

The first programmers were Scientists, who made stuff possible.

Then they became Engineers, who made things practical.

And now they are turning into Artists, to make them beautiful.

Oh, well...

Free Download

[jothaxe]

You can download a free version of Microsoft Expression "Acrylic Graphic Designer" if you feel like trying it. Here is a link... http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/gr aphic_designer/default.aspx

They make me feel PRETTY!

[some guy on slashdot]

Next up from the Microsoft design team:

Glitter Happy Fun Messenger
Bubbly Bunny Chocolate Word
Giggle Tehe Goodtime Player
Candy Candy Popcorn Exchange

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I can think of another legitimate and longstanding problem that needs to be addressed.

So can I, Brain, but where are we going to find a can of cream, a gerbil and two peacock feathers at this time of night?

I dunno

[autopr0n]

I think software developers have the same percentage of good designers as the population at large, and vise versa. I've known some coders who were incredible graphic designers. But most of those people are not going to be interested in something like this, they do their HTML by hand :P

NOoooo!!! Make it go away!!

[bashibazouk]

With both Acrylic Graphic Design and the Metro document format my life should soon be hell. Publisher and word are bad enough from a printing or reprographics point of view but two new file formats that will not play nice with any other non-microsoft or old-microsoft programs. Will not play nice with rips, platemakers and other specialized equipment and won't easily convert into something that will.

I could be wrong here but so far, Microsoft's history in this area is not good.

Re:Developers Developers Developers are not Design

[TheNetAvenger]

One is left brain. One is right brain.

Asking a coder to do artwork is silly.


Actually, both are artsy type of brain activities. Hence why good programmers usually have a good ability to work from both sides of the brain as well.

Go look up Bridged Brains, there are a lot of people out there that can use more of both sides of their brain at once, even if you can't.

Oh, also, these tools are for designers for the most part, not developers, developers take the output of these tools, shove it into Visual Studio for example, and code the backend to these interfaces.

Re:Microsoft Hubris

[idlake]

But now that they know, they plan to rename their product "Microsoft Hubris".

That's actually just a rip-off of Apple Hubris.

Re:Yeah, wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to be employed as a designer/developer

You're what would be called a "technical artist" in the game development world. They're sometimes extremely useful for helping to glue parts of a project together. It can be a lonely position that places you between two worlds, but not fully in either of them. Loathed by programmers for having enough knowledge to damage the codebase, loathed by artists because you can patiently and accurately explain why using a 8192x8192 32-bit uncompressed texture for the app's splash-screen logo is a bad idea.

I've also never worked on a project that had more than one technical artist - I'm starting to believe that if you manage to get two technical artists in the same room (let alone working on the same project), they'll react and cause an explosion which destroys the universe.

most developers have absolutely no sense of aesthetics or design.

Oddly enough, user interface design was part of my Comp. Sci. degree - there's a whole subsection of Computer Science dedicated to man/machine interfaces. Most programmers (well, a few anyway) would agree that the most important part of a program as far as the user/client is concerned - is how the program interacts with the user.

The best programmers (or maybe just the ones who actually have a computer science degree) understand this. They may not be able to design an icon or choose a color scheme (which is where you should come in), but if pushed they should be able to make a basic UI design that is usable, neat and efficient. Neat and uncluttered UI design tends to help produce clean code anyway...

Re:Third normal form?

[autopr0n]

you might find this more helpful. Or maybe less helpfull. Basically what they are saying is there should be no redundant data in a table. Meaning if you shouldn't have 'city' and 'zip code' in a table unless one of them is the primary key, because city and zip code are tied together. Otherwise you'd not be in 3rd normal form, which is, uh, not that important...

Don't forget the new field of interactive design

[Aqua OS X]

Allowing contemporary developers and designers a more effective method of communication is incredibly valuable. Yet more importantly, I think this tool finally marks the industry's official acknowledgment of "interactive designers".

By "interactive designers" I'm not referring to developers who are self-taught photoshop gurus, or designers who know how to alter a script. I'm talking about professionally trained graphic designers who have been schooled in human behavior (psychology / sociology) and software development.

I was totally blown away by the Sparkle demo that was posted to Slashdot last week. Nevertheless, Sparkle is just a tool. It's not going to teach developers the idiosyncrasies of visual communication, and it's not going to teach designer's programing logic. It'll set some boundaries and drastically speed up prototyping.

However, once companies start utilizing tools likes Sparkle, AND start hiring legitimate "interactive designers"... we should start to see some see some really cool shit. "Design" is not something that should be separate from development. Designers and developers / engineers need to be on a design team from stage one.

It's common practice to a) engineer and or conceptualize functionality before considering interactivity and ascetics, and or b) design pretty concepts that are impractical to develop. Both of these approaches don't make any sense.

If you ask me, a software development "dream team" would be composed of adept developers with some schooling in industrial design, and adept graphic designers with schooling in human behavior and computer science. When they'd start a new project, they would enter ideation, design, and development stages together... and they'd have some tools like Sparkle readily available. Because, well, Flash and Photoshop interactivity prototyping is a soul sucking vortex that needs to die. Seriously.

Yet, this won't start to happen until interdisciplinary education becomes common place.

Re:Yeah, wrong

[biovoid]

"Responsive, intuitive and attractive" are all design properties.

Yes, but a designer doesn't develop the responsive interface, they usually create static designs and need to communicate to the developer how the interface reacts to the user, and I've seen developers get that wrong all too often.

Why are you talking to designers about code? Again, it sounds like you have poor communication skills and compensate by assuming that nobody can communicate effectively with "the other side".

I never said nobody can communicate effectively with "the other side", I merely said that someone with intimate knowledge of both sides would have a better chance of communicating with both sides, and if they're in charge of both design and development there is no need for that communication at all. It appears that I'm not the one with the communication problem in this case.

As to why I'm talking to designers about code, again it's about communication (that you seem to think I lack) - often programming constraints mean constraints are then placed on the design, and I like to explain to designers why something can't be done. Usually they're grateful for this, but sometimes I go a bit over their heads.

Re:Dear Lord, I hope not...

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Agreed, open source is a wasteland of creative application design. While the concepts are unique and innovative, usually most get wrapped up in lousy, generic and sterile environments with major usibility issues. Mostly this is because they try and make it work on ALL platforms rather then focusing on one platform.

I am a software developer, but I do have an eye for creativity. I wrote my own library of classes to allow me to create more expressive and innovative interfaces for applications. I can easily duplicate UI found in iTunes or Picassa with it in a few hours. One of the things I struggle with using Microsofts Visual Studio is application design and how rigid (or rediculous) MS made UI design. Dialog and control design for VS has been anything but easy or enjoyable.

I have been very excited about Windows Vista if only for their new presentation layer and XAML support which does effectively separate GUI front ends with backend code. It will allow companies to more easily separate the GUI and pass it off to their art or marketing department while keeping most of the backend developers excluded from the UI design, which in many cases is ideal.

But it will also allow for a more streamlined design environment for those developers that have bridged the gap between GUI design and code design. Those developers who can use Photoshop or any other vector/pixel based graphics editor will be able to create more expresive GUI and with MS supporting more Flash like feature in GUI (like animation with "storyboard" support), I think applications on Windows will become very interesting in the near future.

I don't think MS wants to eliminate the graphics designer position in software development, they have effectively separated the two aspects of application design allowing for designers and developers to do both their jobs well without having to coordinate or synchronize production, which can hold up application progress.

MS seems to be catering to all, those companies with separate design and coding departments, and those with only a few developers doing everything. This should be a welcomed change in the Windows software development market.

Re:Don't forget the new field of interactive desig

[Ender Ryan]

we should start to see some see some really cool shit.

People have been saying that for ever. Instead of really cool shit, we seem to perpetually just get the regular kind of shit.

Missing the point

[Spiked_Three]

It seems like most everyone is missing the point of the product(s).

I worked on a dot.com product that was part of the magical push technology that never happened. We had had an office full of developers, and half an office full of artists/designers. There was quite a bit of work needed to take the artwork and designs, done in Photoshop, illustrator etc, and cut them up, slice them, and hand code ways to interface with the images etc, while providing an environment with motion that we wanted to present to the users. I'd say at least %25 of the work, maybe more was dedicated to making the design work in the program.

That is the market being addressed here. It is not to make a developer into a designer, or a designer into a developer, it is to give the designer a new set of tools that is more closely tied to the end product AND to make it so the developer does not have to convert the design work into something useable in code.

If you have ever taken an application web site designed in Photoshop all the way through to a running deployed application used by hundreds of users you know what I mean. Yes, it is doable today, but a significant portion of the time is spent making the design work with the code, and still layout and look good. These products eliminate the middle work. I'm all for it.

Re:Third normal form?

[shaum]

Not quite. In the classic example, it means you don't store a customer's address in the table of customer orders. If you do, you can wind up with several orders containing the same customer data (for a customer that has more than one order pending). If they change their address, you have to make sure to change *every* copy; worse, if the customer has no orders pending, you have *no* copies of the address.

Putting the data in third normal form would require setting up one table for customer info, another for orders, and each order would contain a foreign key -- an account number, for instance -- to link the order to a customer record. If the customer enters an address change, you update *one* record in the database, and all orders get the new information. Each bit of information is stored in one and only one place, and it will never get into an inconsistent state.

There are other "levels" of normalization, first through fifth, but 3NF is kind of a "sweet spot"; lower levels result in inconsistency in common cases, while higher orders tend to be more effort than they're worth.

Misinformation

[kirkb]

Most of the negative reaction here is due to the statement "Microsoft wants to turn developers into designers", but if you read the article, Microsoft didn't say that. Some industry analyst just pulled that out of his ass.

What this new stuff really does is *disconnects* the UI design from the source code, so that a designer can use one tool to work on the UI while a progammer uses visual studio to put some code behind it.

So rather than "turning designers into developers", it really "lets designers and developers work together better". Or something like that.

smart move

[jilles]

There's clearly an untapped reserve of users who need cheap, easy to use design tools. Adobe & macromedia are at the very high end of the market. Their tools are powerful, expensive and intimidating. Sure they have some entry level versions of some tools but these are individual tools, not integrated suits of tools.

Microsoft has cleverly spotted this opportunity.

Also, Microsoft already has much of the necessary technology in various office addons that most people don't even know about (e.g. MS Publisher, photo editor), various stuff from their research department (mainly photo editing), and other stuff like their movie editor. And finally with some acquired components you can build a pretty interesting suite that is not so capable as the high end offerings from Adobe and Macromedia but cheap and usable. That's a good position to start from and over time they'll be able to add features to make the product more interesting.

Ideal for home users that want to edit their holiday pics, ideal for small businesses wanting to make a brochure, etc. In fact good enough for the majority of people who own a photoshop license, a dreamweaver license or an illustrator license. It's amazing how many people buy stuff they don't need. At the office we have a few photoshop licenses. The most advanced thing that ever happens there is to crop a few photos and create some transparent gifs, that sort of stuff. All the artwork we use in our website is actually delivered by professional design studios. Only recently the use of the gimp was promoted for this kind of stuff.

The world is full of users for who photoshop (or it's lightweight derivatives) is overkill or who do not need the full capabilities of illustrator or who do not need to develop complex webpages in inDesign or dreamweaver and who generally feel intimidated by all of the previous tools. Yet these people want to create stuff. They don't want to shop for this tool or that tool. Instead they want the tools on their PC when they buy them. People are lazy, most of them never buy software after their new PC is delivered.

And who happens to have a big influence on what is preinstalled? Right, Microsoft. Imagine how many people will toggle that nice MS Design Studio checkbox on the dell site (hell, why not it's only XX $ and I'll be able to do foo with it). Imagine how many companies will be tempted to spend a few dollars per desktop for this. It's easy money for MS. Even if it's only 1 percent of their users, that still is a huge amount of money.

You could argue that they are abusing their market position. You could also argue that other companies have simply failed to fill this gap in the market for years. Adobe only recently started to make consumer versions of their tools. You need to buy them individually and the full suit of tools is for high end users with big budget only.