Yousef’s blog

Designertopia

February 22, 2007 on 6:10 am | In Uncategorized |

On the first day of February I left at about 5 AM to Rotterdam Airport to catch my flight to London. I visited the Designertopia conference held February 1st/2nd this year. Even though the conference was mainly targeted at designers (and being mostly a developer myself) the sessions were pretty interesting.

Most of the sessions were about Microsoft’s new product suite for designers: Expression. The Expression product suite is divided into 4 different products, of which I find Expression Blend and Expression Web the most interesting. Expression Blend can be seen as a tool to easily design interfaces based on XAML. Expression Web is like Frontpage-done-properly. At least, that’s what I hope. The presentations about it surely looked promising, but I don’t have enough experience using the product myself yet to come to a conclusion.

Every time slot, there were basically two sessions you could follow: the creative one or the technical one. Not surprisingly, I mostly attended the technical sessions. One of my favorites was ‘The Windows Vista user experience’ during which Tjeerd Hoek (fellow Dutchman and user experience design director for Microsoft) described the several stages designers went through before they came up with the final design of Windows Vista.

After this session, Carrie Longson demoed a series of WPF projects. She definitely succeeded impressing me with the eye-candy she showed. The most impressive project to me was a WPF monitoring system of the London Underground (2D and 3D!). You can see it yourself in the first video listed on this page (the demo starts somewhere near the 44th minute).

Another quite interesting session was the one in which Jon Harris used Expression Blend to create a WPF user interface consisting of several components within 60 minutes.

I went to Designertopia as MSP (Microsoft Student Partner). I met several other MSPs at the conference, mostly from the UK of course. One of them was Darren Straight, who I also met during a Windows Live Session in London in May 2006.  Check out his blog for a more detailed report on the conference. 

Tags: conference, designertopia, expresion, microsoft, vista, webdesign, webdevelopment