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Any Cool Silverlight Design?

Posted: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Author: Wahyudi

Maybe it is not fair to compare Flash with Silverlight from the point of view of how each technology is being spread. What I mean by that is that Flash has been around much longer than Silverlight. The Flash adoption by User Interface designers is huge, while I think Silverlight at this time still a kind of toy for .net developers, not designers. If I compare online Flash gallery from Styleboost with the official Silverlight gallery, I can see clearly that Silverlight gallery shows more the technical features in creating visual effects but without any good design elements. If you look at the Styleboost gallery, you will see both: cool design in all aspects (graphics, fonts, images, layout, interaction) and good functionality. 

Based on my own experience as UI Designer and Application developer, who lives in all possible domains: design (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), mark-up (XHTML, XAML), and code (c#, JavaScript, etc), one needs to understand what the new technologies are intended to. If you used to be WinForm developer (I don’t think there is WinForm designer in your team), from now on you should split the work to Designer and Developer if you want to use WPF or Silverlight. Otherwise you will most likely encounter the issue that you think you cannot addopt WPF because you start with XAML and find out it is not just drag-and-drop. Let a UI designer or developer do the layout and design works, they are used to mark-up stuffs, styling, templating, separating design and structure.