Rick Barraza

Wednesday October 31, 2007

Lost In Translation

There are a lot of tutorials out there for Silverlight, but many of them fall into two camps: Preaching to the choir or treating interactive designers like code phobic pixel pushers. Now, I’m a designer and a developer, as an apparently silent but influential minority of you are. In design mode, I draw the vision and in development mode I make it happen. But personally, I don’t trust my designs to mere markup tags and WYSIWYG editors. I never have, and I don’t think most people like me have. Give me Notepad over Dreamweaver, any day. It’s how I roll. That’s why Flash was such a revolutionary tool. A single environment that actually understood what we wanted; a place to create beautiful things and bring them to life with a powerful and forgiving language.

Some of us designers have been coding our own dynamic interfaces in Flash long before the .NET platform even existed. So why does Silverlight assume that a strong divide between designer and developer must exist and require two different solutions and work environments?

The party line that ‘Designers do their thing over here, and hand it off for developers to do their stuff over there’ doesn’t hold water with me. Not for what Silverlight is trying to do, which is leap frog into a territory that already has Flash as its dominant species.

What it should be focusing on is aggressive innovation, and aggressive innovation is always the result of magicians mixing form and function in a revolutionary way. This is what Flash allowed and this is why they won five years ago. This is no longer what Flex does, because what gets someone to first place is not always the same thing that will keep them there. But I’m afraid Silverlight is copying the compartmentalized but integrated workflow of Flex instead of the innovative Form & Function miracle that was early Flash.

So, as someone who is already used to working in an environment that lets me be both artist and developer at once, if Blend or Designer don’t let me manage at least C# code directly in them, they’re not going to be powerful enough, period. So the other option for me is to work in Visual Studio directly.

Now Orcas is a powerhouse. As a developer, it gives me everything I want, but I happened to have the time, inclination and past Microsoft experience to go up its rather steep learning curve. But it’s definitely programmer focused and a big pill to swallow for designers wanting to experiment with Silverlight.

Which leads me up to this blog. I’ve spent a long time teaching interactive programming to graphic designers, and an even longer time working in Flash. What I want to do with this blog is present Silverlight and build projects approaching them with all the prejudices and assumptions that a seasoned Flash designer fluent in Actionscript 1.0 would have. If anything, it may serve to document our mindset and how we think a little better. At best, it could be a simplified Rosetta Stone for those Interactive Designers looking to translate their Flash based skill set to this new platform.