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

[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

[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.

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...

[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...

[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. :-)

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*

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?

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.

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: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 .

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.

Hmmm

[crawdad62]

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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...

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: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.

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.