Cory Plotts' Blog » Design

Tagxedo

cplotts — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:48:33 +0000

Ok, I don’t know what it is … but I really like this site, http://www.tagxedo.com/, that people have been tweeting about recently. I think it appeals to my designer tendencies.

Basically, the site allows you to create some pretty cool tag clouds. Oh, and by the way, it is done with Silverlight. Nice!

Here is the tag cloud for my blog to date:

Share/Save

UI Design for Developers

cplotts — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:15:02 +0000

In light of my previous post on design for developers, I thought I would also go ahead and also quickly point to Arturo Toledo’s blog and his UI Design for Developer Series. Arturo is designer who is a product manager at Microsoft and his blog has loads of designer goodies and links.

In this particular goodie, Microsoft has produced (with Total Training) 13 videos and has even provided the assets so you can work along while you watch. In his blog post, Arturo provides links to both the videos and assets, and I provided them here, as well, for convenience.

1. Principles of Design: Learning about Balance	Video	Assets
2. Principles of Design: Learning about Rhythm	Video	Assets
3. Principles of Design: Learning about Emphasis	Video	Assets
4. Principles of Design: Learning about Symmetry & Asymmetry	Video	Assets
5. Principles of Design: Learning about Unity	Video	Assets
6. Principles of Design: Learning about Points, Lines, & Form	Video	Assets
7. Choosing Colors to Complement Your User Interface	Video	Assets
8. Experimenting with User Interface Colors	Video	Assets
9. Creating Mosaic & Tiled Patterns	Video	Assets
10. Learning to Create Icons	Video	Assets
11. Creating a Sample Icon	Video	Assets
12. Designing a Glassy Button	Video	Assets
13. Applying Effects to Bitmap Images	Video	Assets

He promises that he is already working on Part II of this series!

By the way, I love this trend to teach design basics to developers, because I think it is only through a mutual sharing of knowledge, from designer to developer and vice-versa, that we are truly going to capitalize on these awesome UX technologies like WPF and Silverlight.

Share/Save

Design Fundamentals for Developers

cplotts — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:22:50 +0000

Robby Ingebretsen’s MIX09 workshop, Design Fundamentals for Developers, is now online! If you can’t tell from my earlier post about Kaxaml, I’m a big fan of Robby’s, and this session is 3 hours of pure goodness.

Click on the image to watch the session streamed at the MIX09 site.

From the MIX09 summary:

From colors to wireframes, this workshop introduces you to the fundamental principles and techniques of application design. The workshop is tuned especially for people who have some background in coding. If you are a developer who is working more frequently with designers, evolving to become a designer yourself, or simply a manager who needs to make sure that both roles work smoothly together, this session is an invaluable opportunity to jump-start the process.

In a world where development and design are converging in UX technologies like WPF and Silverlight, this is a free workshop that you will want to watch! Especially if you are developer with designer tendencies … like me.

Jamie Rodriguez from Microsoft has kindly provided three download links to each of the three parts:

A big thanks to Robby for putting such a high quality workshop together … and thanks to the Microsoft guys like Jamie who posted it online. Woot!

Share/Save