Zeus Jones domination at AiR
A little over a month ago, we sent one of our designers to a 10 day all out fistfight training session at Redmond for Silverlight. It was carnage, destruction and utter domination a great experience. By the end of the brawl training, Zeus Jones was the only agency standing had learned a lot and won the top prize. Our designer Peter has the lowdown:
Recently we were invited by Microsoft to participate in the AiR Program (Artists in Residency.) The goal of AiR is to give designers and developers hands on experience working with their new Silverlight technology and Expression Studio. Like most designers, Apple and Adobe have been my preferred platforms for years, so I admit I was a bit skeptical as to what the Microsoft tools were capable of, however new tools and technology is what has drawn me to digital design, so I was looking forward to see what they had to offer.
The first few days consisted of presentations that showcased the product’s capabilities as well as training. It was a little overwhelming to think about changing my existing workflow, but as I learned more I became more interested in how Microsoft is trying to streamline the designer/developer workflow. Designers and Developers all have their own methods in which they see as the most efficient workflows and I think most will admit that their workflow could still be improved. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is trying to solve the problem with their new products. Companies have attempted to do this in the past, but nothing that I’ve seen has every really satisfied both designer and developer.
The goal of the Expression/Silverlight workflow is to have designers and developers working on the project simultaneously, right from the start. In my experience, it’s not perfect yet, but I do think it’s headed in the right direction and we can’t forget that the tools are only in version 2.
After a few days of getting up to speed with the tools, we got the opportunity to start using them by designing and building an application in 7 days. Fortunately, we were paired with mentors from Microsoft who helped us along as we hit roadblocks. For our project, we chose to keep the scale of the application relatively small and it was important that we focused on form and function equally. With this in mind, we decided to evolve a digital service that we already find very useful and we chose Social Bookmarking.
Many of the popular social bookmarking tools like deli.cio.us are great. Although these tools are highly functional, they often provide a less than satisfying user experience when you’re tasked with searching through long pages of text links. Using tags and descriptions are helpful when searching, but we thought a visual reference would make these tools even more useful. Our application Snowflake was born, a visual social bookmarking tool.
Over the course of 7 days we designed and developed Snowflake using the new Microsoft tools. There were some long days, but creating an application in in 7 days was a great experience and we’re really happy with how it turned out. Of the 10 agencies that participated in AiR, our application was awarded The People’s Choice Award by Microsoft, so along with our new application we headed home to Minneapolis with a pair of new Xbox’s. As far as the future of Snowflake, I think it has potential and would like to see our UI plugged into the deli.cio.us API. Try Snowflake here.
The question that most people are asking is, how does Silverlight compare to Flash? In my opinion Flash started out as more of a designer’s tool, with basic animations and interactions. As time went on, more developers became interested with Flash and pushed it to it’s limits with complex websites and applications. In my experience at AiR, it appears Silverlight has taken the opposite approach, from the start it’s been a platform that developers are interested in and now they’ve opened the door to designers with the release of Expression Studio. It’s hard to compete with the Adobe tools that designers love, but I think Expression is off to a strong start.
Lately design appears to be a top priority at Microsoft, which is apparent in new products like Surface, Zune, Sync, and Expression so I look forward to seeing where they take all these new technologies as it’s only going to make our digital experiences better.