Opinion/Honest Appraisal of Design Functionality
- I've been using Design for quite a period and one question that has been nagging me is what other Designers think of it's feature set and ability to output the style and look that is required by a project?My current opinion is that the drawing tools in Design seem to compare quite badly to the advanced options of the Adobe apps. It's vector drawing set seems to tend towards producing that typical gradient heavy vector UI look. You can easily point out that it's not the tool that produces the artwork, but the artist. However the level of textural finesse and effects that helps make something distinctive involves so many workarounds and clunky half measures that it becomes cost prohibitive for ongoing projects.The vast majority of the video samples I've watched seem to draw some rudimentary shapes , apply a gradient and use some throwaway line such as "you can create whatever you want" and leave it at that. It may be my misunderstanding of the role of the program, but I'm worried that Design will be dictating the look of my artwork which seems a death knell for making Design and Blend invisible tools for a designer to create original work. Importing the work from something like Illustrator seems to be an admission of Design's shortcomings and there are too many restrictions with the import method to make it something to rely on.I'd love to hear some other experiences...whether you agree or violently disagree....
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- No opinions so far? Well perhaps if I just asked people whether you feel you are able to solely use the Expression tools for a project (including mockups and comps) or do you need to include other programs.For my part I feel I have to replicate my work as I produce the visual mockup in photoshop using vector shapes and layer styles and then I have to approximate that again in Design. E.g Something like an inner glow which is quite important to suggest depth and rounding on a window or bevel is trivial to do with the Photoshop vector shape but we the workaround in Design is a bit of a nightmare.
- Maybe the silence speaks volumes?
- Hi Kiwicelt,
From my experience in running beta groups on various versions of Expression Design I've concluded that how a person feels about Design depends on whether or not they are familiar with Design's predecessor program, Expression 3.3. Those familiar with Expression 3.3 dislike Expression Design with a passion. Those not familiar with it's predecessor, love it.
One thing that the Design developers felt was important was to follow the shortcuts and some other features in Adobe Illustrator to make it easier for Illustrator user to find their way around Design. Quite often we hear from Illustrator users who say that they love Design because it eliminates the complexity of Illustrator. Seems there are alot of Illustrator users who find Illustrator complex and confusing.
In my opinion, the only way Design is going to sport more complex features is when the output of those features produce translate well to XAML. Personally, I'd like to see some of Design's tools replaced with the tools in Blend which I think are superior. I also think Design needs to work on better support for file formats like .psd and .ai and I wouldn't expect to see more advanced features in Design until those issues are worked out.
Sorry for the late reply!
Annie - <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } -->
Hey ya.
This is my first project using Expression Design and I can tell you, it's been a struggle. At the moment I am doing all my designs first up in Photoshop, because I'm a lot faster in putting it together and making changes. Now I'm trying to recreate the same design in Expresion Design. It is defiantly a long process, and I haven't found anything positive yet that makes it superior to Photoshop. All the backend team are using silverlight and whatever so, I'm sure when it comes to importing my files it will be easy as pie (um, yeah, pie) but when it doesn't look exactly the same as my photoshop file it's a huge downfall. Less filters, Less Layer Style (Effects) and even the fact that the one's that are there still don't match up to what the PS produce (for example, drop shadow makes the box stroke all blury, wtf?)
Stuff that I'm annoyed at that could be improved;
Gradient tool. When you resize a box with a gradient in it, it doesn't change with it, you have to fiddle around for ages to re-create it.
Layers. You cant move more than one layer at a time.
Layer Hirachie. You cant have a layer within a layer, like with PS where you can have folders within folders... Unless I missed something, this should just be a no brainer.
I get the feeling like Design just doesn't want you to use any rastered images at all. I don't know how to explain why, it just feels tedious in adding them.
96 resolution as standard is stupid, especially when you cant even change it in Blend.
Ok, there are more but I think I've had my rant. When I first started using Expression Design 1, I was a bit skeptical of the quality. I found that if I adjusted my own working habits "From Photoshop" that I was able to adjust. For web graphics I have been using Expression Design 2 exclusively on projects for about 4 months now, and all has been well.
