Facing Blend – Page 10 – A. Rheannon S.

It Keeps Me Awake and Drives Me Out of Bed

Posted on July 9, 2009 by ARSpaulding

In a recently published article on BNet.com, they say that the most important lists are the ones that answer the two questions:

1) Things that Keep Me Up All Night

2) Reasons I Get Up in the Morning

To answer the 1st and the 2nd, I just recently had been thinking on this very subject. Number one on this list used to be gaming. I used to be able to play a good engaging problem solving type of video game that was done well that challenged me for quite a long time – sometimes through to the next day, but times change – I’ve changed.

In 2004 I discovered something that drove me like nothing else that I’ve ever experienced and nothing else since. Design – not just graphics design, but the entire implementation of it. I know, this seems a little pointed given that this is my blog site about my experience in design, but it was then in 2004 that I spent 3 days non-stop creating web interfaces for a website that at that time was pretty huge with hundreds of millions of visitors a day. I’d spend days without sleep, forgetting to eat or even to go to the bathroom, designing and implementing “Skins” as I called them back then, to the forums, image galleries, and front page layout of this popular gaming network website, and it wasn’t just the graphics. The layout, the typography, the implementation of the logo in creative ways while still maintaining a signature style. It was my kung fu and… years later now – I look back and really don’t consider much of that work to have been all that good compared to what I can do now – but back then I thought it was brilliant.

That feeling hasn’t gone away. Any time the company that I work for puts me on a new project, I get that “zing” where my brain is churning on a never ending cycle of problem, solution, problem, solution until I find the optimal pattern to go with and then I go after it and make it happen. The design comps, the excruciating waiting process while I mentally rehearse the various ways to present the comps and explanations for the various implamentation methods, then once the business decides on what they want to go with, the sitting down at the computer, cranking up the perfect music that I will almost not even hear, but is required regardless – and then the implementation to markup and making it come to life and the entire brain-sucking mind-trance enducing work and joy of seeing everything begin to come together.

That is the good stuff. That’s what keeps me awake, and when I go to bed, I dream about the work and wake up and am immediately in a mental state of problem solving and project planning. What needs to be implemented next? What can’t I wait to get to and to see come to life? What is still fuzzy that I just know will gain clarity as the project gets closer to completion?

Its good.

The design, the project, and the entire process and discussion and implementation. I just don’t know anything else that can keep me so whole-body focussed. I love it.

Very funny blog on a design firm website

Posted on June 19, 2009 by ARSpaulding

A friend of mine just recently had an interview at a local design firm in Seattle, and just for the heck of it, I decided to check out the company’s web presence. Now, I’m quite impressed with the far reaches they have established in the user experience market, but what tickled me the most was a blog titled Microwave for the Masses, ok, a little tag line to stir the interest: Thermonuclear Hotpockets.

Genius, hillarious – read it. Seriously.

MixView UX discussion at Tomorrow's SeattleD2ig meeting

Posted on June 16, 2009 by ARSpaulding

For those of you who are new to reading my blog, I’m one of the coordinators for the local interaction group, Seattle D2ig, or written out fully, the Seattle Developer / Designer Interaction Group.

The group meets once a month, typically the 3rd wednesday of every month, and the purpose behind the group is to share experiences between developers and designers and foster a greater level of understanding across the two groups. Every month we have a different speaker and we’ve had many different presentations every month since the group started, from iphone development and design, to Silverlight and Flash/Flex presentations and many others that fit in between.

This month’s speaker will be Rochelle Benavides who is going to talk about her work with the ever popular Zune MixView.

So join us in Bellevue at 7pm on Wednesday the 17th.

Please note: These are very casual meetings that tend to last anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half and there are a group of us that often hit up a local restaurant afterwards for food and drinks afterwards.

For more information, visit SeattleD2ig.org

FacingBlend.com in silverlight!

Posted on May 28, 2009 by ARSpaulding

FacingBlend’s Silverlight page is LIVE!

Click here to view

Since yesterday, I’ve had several emails asking questions regarding this release, so I thought I’d share a bit.

Most websites that I’ve seen around which had displays of Silverlight use weren’t as artistic as I thought a site could be. Expression Blend is a very powerful tool, and like most tools, if you really play with it, you can find that you can do almost anything if you just play with it long enough and tailor things to fit what you want, but… I’m not seeing that being done!

So I wanted to create a silverlight website that really pushed hard and heavy on the “pretty” side. I wanted it to use my favorite color, green ( no relation to the current popularity with “going green” ), but still have a little “windows vista /7” glassy watery look/ feel for the background. The centerfocus on the site isn’t really the content, its on the background which is done entirely in XAML.

That’s right – the pretty thing that appears to be raster based, is 100% xaml.

Now, I wasn’t really going for a “portfolio” either – this is my personal website. My play-thing over the web, so I stayed away from the typical “portfolio” feel. I’m having fun here. I feel like I’m playing when I’m working in Expression Blend, and I really wanted that to show in the design. I think my absolute favorite part is a little geeky. Even the icons are done in Xaml and I think there’s just something awesome about that.

The Toybox itself was what pulled back my timeline a bit. What to put in there? What to NOT put in there and how the heck do I want to organize it?

Well, I kept not having time to work on this and it sat on a back burner not being worked on for months. I seriously had this nearly done back in December of 08, but I got stuck working on a few other things and having a blast with my family and helping out with a logo for the company, Seovian (which you can find in my galleries here on my blog).

I then was pushed by 2 different projects that I’m working with to upgrade to Silverlight 3 and with that, I forced everything aside, brought Facing Blend in Silverlight back into the forefront and finished the entire Toybox in 3 days(in my spare time).

I still look at this stuff and have to remind myself that I actually did this, all on my own, that I’m not looking at someone else’s work. I still can’t believe how much I’ve learned in such a short amount of time. Maybe it’ll sink in a few years from now, but until then, I keep getting deeply involved in design work and when I come “out of it” and look at the whole picture, I am impressing even myself. 2 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed that I could do what I just released. It just blows my mind.

Deseloper Vs. Devigner

Posted on May 21, 2009 by ARSpaulding

Last night’s Seattle D2ig meetup was quite interesting with speaker Yoeun Pen explaining Flex and how this is bringing Flash development and design forward into well… today.

After the meeting, there was the amusing conversation regarding the “Integrator” role and the 2 names that have been mockingly thrown back and forth regarding “other ways” to name a person who is both what I call a hybrid – Designer and Developer.

But as I was drifting off to sleep on our way home from Bellevue (I promise, I wasn’t driving – I was sleeping! ha ha – and in the passanger seat), it dawned on me – Deseloper vs. Devigner. These COULD be more technically used terms, and here’s how:

Devigner

A lot of hybrids (as in people, not cars) come from a strong development background and are beginning to pick up on their naturally innate ability to see more than just the code – they have an eye on a window into design and understand design concepts which allows them to be quite the handyman as they’ll have one of the best relationships with the designers, instead of butting heads. Their strongest trait being in Development; while they get and have the ability to paint the picture they mostly are just making the code play nice and implement the artwork into that code.

Moto: Code – meet Art. Art – meet Code.

Deseloper

This person is a designer first and foremost, but like me, has found the desire to do more than just paint the picture – we want to make it move! There’s a little bit of practical logic tied into this creative mind, and this allows the Deseloper to shine in being able to take their creative artwork and understand how to wire it up so that it APPEARS to do something. The actual hard coding is still being done by someone much more talented in development skills, but this designer has a few tricks up his or her sleeve that gives them a kick while getting through their design projects.

Moto: Hey you! Pretty picture! Dance!

Disorientation between Blend & Photoshop

Posted on May 19, 2009 by ARSpaulding

I’ve come to the conclusion that this will likely never go away. The more I work in Expression Blend, the stronger the case of disorientation is when I come back to photoshop to do a quick mockup of something and I figured that there would likely be a time where I would go between the two and seeing as how I know what to do once the application is open based on its UI, that I’d recall the differences w/o issue as though it were all muscle memory.

However, the similarities of controls and manipulation are just so similar that every time I switch between the two, it takes a moment for the change to click.

For instance – shapes – aka vector objects. Photoshop has vector objects – they’re not as easy to manipulate after they’ve been placed in a layer as they would be if I were in illustrator or blend, but they do have them in photoshop and I use them more than I think any other tool in photoshop. It helps that I’ve lately been using photoshop to do mockups of things that will translate to Expression Blend… but there-in lies the problem.

So an example: In photoshop, I have a circle, I need place it and its not quite right. So I scale it… but oh yeah, I need to approve the append in photoshop. In blend, I make the change and its much more like illustrator. It just is – its done. Changed.

Gradients – I’ve come to very VERY much enjoy the flexibility of hand manipulating direction and well.. every characteristic of a gradient. I’d like to toot my own horn and say that I’ve actually gotten pretty damn good at it. In photoshop, its all raster based. So its… seriously different. Sure – a whole lot more can be done, but I also find limitations to the power of the rastering in photoshop.

So yeah – anyway. I think I’ve officially determined that I will likely never get over that first 5 minutes of “oh yeah, that’s right, I’m not working in ___”

Oh – and just for the heck of it because I’ve gone a different direction, below is a screenshot of a flower recreated using gradients in blend – next to the example flower which is a photograph of a real flower.