QUICKLY ITERATE THE FINAL USER INTERFACE, GRAPHICS AND FUNCTIONALITY OF YOUR SILVERLIGHT APPLICATION WITH EXPRESSION BLEND

Designers and developers can work seamlessly together, sharing Silverlight projects, code, and designs for better productivity and quality. Designers can quickly create stunning, rich user experiences, which the developer can immediately leverage in the underlying application code.  There is no conversion needed, no recreation of graphics in code, simply a smooth transition from the designer to the developer.

This superior Silverlight workflow which separates the XAML user interface from the underlying application code, allows designers and developers to iterate quickly on both the design and code aspects of the application without impacting the work of the other.

This gives both the freedom to be creative and push the boundaries of an application’s design.  This creative freedom for both is liberating. Designers can continue iterating and refining the user experience in Expression Blend much later into the application design cycle safe in the knowledge they are not generating extra work for their development team to integrate the changes into the final application. No longer do developers have to be concerned with last minute design changes having an impact on the underlying code integrity of the application.

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In building the site for EasyJet, designers also used Microsoft Expression® Studio suite of design and media applications. Included within this suite, Microsoft Expression Blend™ offers a professional design tool for creating rich graphical interfaces for Web and desktop applications. Beau Ginbey, Interaction Designer, Splendid, says: “Expression Blend provided us with a seamless workflow to ensure our designs were ready for the developers to work with, giving us pixel perfect results. It breaks down the barriers that can exist between the user-experience and development teams, helping them work together on one big project, as opposed to separate chunks of work.”

WORK WITH EXISTING DESIGN TOOLS AND ASSETS IN A VARIETY OF INDUSTRY STANDARD FORMATS SUCH AS PSD, AI, AND JPEG.

An important aspect of the design process is the ability for designers to build on ideas and concepts that they’ve created previously.

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Designers will enjoy exploring the creative freedom of the Silverlight platform while still being able to leverage the work created with other design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator by directly importing the graphics and visual elements into the Expression design tools.

The ability to use industry standard file formats such as PSD, AI and JPEG, as well as leveraging XAML for an enhanced designer and developer collaboration throughout the application design process, increases the ability for the designer to deliver an uncompromised version of their vision without needing to dramatically change their existing work practices.

DEPLOY YOUR APPLICATION ON ANY SILVERLIGHT ENABLED PLATFORM SAFE IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT IT ITS LOOK AND FEEL WILL BE EXACTLY REPRODUCED IN EACH BROWSER ON EACH PLATFORM.

Designers are passionate about the visual integrity of their work, in the same way developers are passionate about the quality and robustness of their code. The most frustrating area for a designer working on the web today is the almost impossible task of replicating with any degree of accuracy their original vision across different machines, browsers or platforms.

Different monitor resolutions, different screen DPIs, different rendering engines in the many browsers available today all cause the vision of the designer to be compromised from what they intended to deliver.
Silverlight provides a powerful and consistent runtime across different browsers and platforms giving designers the confidence that their design will remain exactly as intended wherever the application is running.

During a project the consistent rendering and playback of the Silverlight platform across its different supported platforms and browsers enable the designer to concentrate fully on the overall application experience, rather than constantly having to tweak and alter the application UI to achieve a consistent playback on different platforms.
From initial concept throughout the entire development process to the final application and from there deployed across different platforms and browser, consistently and uncompromised. The Silverlight platform, Expression tools and Visual Studio combine to enable the designers’ vision to be fully realized.