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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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: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.

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...

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?

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...

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.