I was taught to avoid high-fidelity mockups for as long as possible. But there is an important role for high-fidelity mockups as well. If only we could have both... I've just finished reading " Design Vision " by Luke Wroblewski, Dirk Knemeyer, Bob Baxley, and Jim Leftwich. (I make it a policy never to be more than two years behind in my work reading.) Quite a few points got my attention, including a discussion of the important role of high-fidelity (even pixel-perfect) mockups in the design

For the last week Kordesy and I have been at the Microsofties' version of 'Artists in Residence' at Microsoft in Redmond. The idea of Artists in Residence is to give a developer/designer pair the chance to get some training and mentoring from experts while they work on a Silverlight project together over the course of a week. After some to-ing anf fro-ing we came up with an idea to use Silverlight to add interactive 'depth' to a traditional portal site. Check out the video to see how we went. Watch

If you are a designer working on a Silverlight 1.0 project, or if you are working with designers, check out the video by Arturo Toledo entitled "Workflow of Silverlight with Expression and Visual Studio from the recent " Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter " event in the US. Arturo talks about wireframing in Expression Blend and emphasises the importance of establishing a naming convention as early as possible. Wireframes Interaction designers typically create wireframes for user interfaces

I met Rene de Paula, fellow UXE from Brazil, our "UX Summit" in Madrid(!) last week. In the break after my " Wireframing with Blend " session, Rene took me out into the hallway and shot this short video. Still need to work on those short answers... http://blogs.msdn.com/renedepaula/archive/2007/10/17/entrevista-prototipando-aplicacoes-interativas-ricas.aspx