Designer Tool:
A piece of software focused on conceptual design work. Typically used by design professionals where creating original art is the main focus of their job. – Unofficial Unpublished Stockton Dictionary of terms
Tool for Design:
A piece of software focused on production design work. Typically used by design professionals, production artists, web developers, Silverlight integrators and many others. Often design work is only a small portion of these professional’s job. – Unofficial Unpublished Stockton Dictionary of terms
The differences above may be subtle, but they represent a fundamental change in the way Microsoft is marketing Expression Blend. Personally I love this change. Basically they are recognizing that not everyone that uses Blend is a designer even if they are performing design tasks. I’ll talk a little more about that in a bit. The words conceptual and production above are mine, not in the messaging from Microsoft but I feel they help to show the distinction. Not that Blend can’t be used for conceptual work, quite the contrary, I just meant to show that it can be used by non-traditional design professionals. Or even by those who don’t consider themselves design professionals.
This isn’t causing a change is the way the tool works or its workflow. This doesn’t mean the Blend team is going to change the prioritization of one feature over another, at least not that I’m aware of. What is does mean is that the team knows that people like myself are quite proficient with Blend and it is an essential part of my workflow.
Will this change the way you work?
No, and maybe.
I shied away from “it depends” since I’m not an architect . What I mean by that incredibly vague answer is that in general no, the change in messaging will not affect your day to day work. If you are a designer, you will continue doing design and if you are a developer you will continue to develop. But how it might affect you is if you fall into the small category of people that is beginning to call ourselves “Silverlight Integrators”. Integrators come from various backgrounds but typically either design or development. Our most common role in the process is to take static comps produced by a traditional designer and wire them up to the data and logic created by traditional developers. I’ll post more on this ever evolving role in a future article.
The change this may bring about it a wider acknowledgement that part of what a Silverlight Integrator is doing is design work, but we are still developers. I believe that once our own companies understand this, our contributions will be greater understood and appreciated.
At least I hope so.
