Home >
A few friends of mine had been hinting that I need to get a little more creative with my Silverlight designs. I certainly agreed with them since I am the classical "developer without a design clue" kind of guy. So I took it upon myself to start figuring out how to think outside the creative box. The first thing I did was to stop thinking about sqaures and rectangles. Think about the standard UI design, textboxes, listboxes, buttons, they are all quadrilaterals. No harm in that really, but do they really need to be gray and white? I think not! Do menus need to be drop down lists? Does screen real estate need to be an issue?
Lots of good questions.So the once I started thinking about sliding animations, drawers, spinning 3d elements, and soothing color combinations, I took a step back and made sure I did not break the cardinal rule of UI's: Make sure the elements are completely intuitive. In other words, don't make hexagon shaped buttons or round textboxes. For example, it may sound cool to make a button be an image, but the user is likely to have no clue that they can click it. The elements need to be instinctively obvious to the user. However, there is no reason this has to stop you (or me) from making UI designs more creative.
The next thing I did was to check out Smashing Magazine ... this site is awesome! It has fonts, backgrounds, color schemes, design ideas, lots of creative aspects that really get the mind moving in directions that perhaps it had not gone before. I found myself browsing this site for a few hours one night and I had to pull myself away. The design ideas were just astounding to me. This is my first stop now when I need some creative ideas for a RIA design.
I am by no means a creative design genius in RIA but at least now I have some help. If you are a developer coming to the RIA world, I recommend trying to think about design and UI differently. Lean on resources like Smashing Magazine. And when all else fails, watch the clouds for a spell. Sometimes I get my best ideas staring at the sky :)
Tag Cloud
Podcasts & Screencasts
@InsideRIA on Twitter
Follow InsideRIA on Twitter
Facebook Application Development
Sorry, but what's the point of your article?? Well, have a look at Smashing Magazine ... that's nothing brand new.
Apart from that I didn't see any other concrete ideas or suggestions, just a lot of general blabla ...
Well, that was helpful Thomas. I found it to be a useful article. Thanks.
Just to make my point clearer: if I come across an article with the title "Creative Ideas for RIA", I would be happy to read suggestions how to improve the design side of a RIA and not just some general design advice along the lines of "not everything should be white and gray and rectangular but take usability into account".
Well, I can also browse the Smashing Magazine for hours but how does that help me to improve the creative side of a RIA? Is there any way or approach to (conceptually) design a RIA from a different, more designer-centric angle?
I'm with Thomas, this article reads like a moderately interesting blog post, but is pretty much devoid of any useful information or education.
The article boils down to "I want more originality in my UI design. So I browse SmashingMagazine". Wow, how informative. I'm gonna tell all the developers I know about this groundbreaking technique I learned here.
a very good book about this subject can be found at the following url:
http://www.designingwebinterfaces.com
I read it and learned a lot :-)
shameless plug? ;-)
I think the point should be that developers shouldn't be afraid to hire or collaborate with designers when building apps. I see a lot of developer apps, websites, etc., where the design is lacking, I'm sure some designer out there would help them out for some coding or publicity in return...
I agree with other commenters. Feels like the article was written just for the sake of writing something and/or plugging a brand.