I’m currently consulting independently for an incredibly cool team of developers and designers. The process has been a joy, both for me and for my clients. In part, it has shown me that Expression Blend (2.5) has matured to the point where it delivers on the promise of dramatically improving the developer-designer workflow.

I had the good fortune of working with my clients’ lead designer about 5 years ago, on a Managed DirectX project that proceeded very much like “tweak, compile, run.” The current WPF project is, instead, very much “nudge, nudge, nudge.”

Their lead designer, upon seeing his artwork and user interface come alive in Blend, reflected back on the not-quite-as-good old days and said: “Mate, this is ‘the future’.”

How we collaborate

Even though he doesn’t always work with the main branch when adding new content, he routinely authors XAML content (including Storyboards) in side projects.  We developers then just grab and paste it into the application. And then the designer “nudges” the content some more.

This “side Project” technique helps us transfer from designer to developer the burden of enforcing a coding guideline like the Stovell Conventions, and lets designers focus instead on being creative with Blend. (Relevant aside: I really like Paul’s Guidelines, particularly regarding Resource organization).

It’s gone so well that next week I’m introducing the lads to the nerd+art snippets so they can increase their superpowers. (The first time their lead designer wrote a C# event handler himself, he took a screen shot of the C# code and sent it to the rest of the developers just to show off) :)

I have all the Artistic Ability of a Slug

I mentioned that this experience has also been a joy for me as a developer. I feel like I’ve put a creative framework into the hands of someone who can make it work wonders. And it cost me a lot less ($0) than it would have cost me to buy my musical little sister a Baby Grand…