This article was inspired by two interesting days at the GUI&Design conference that took place just recently on 8th and 9th December in Fürth, Germany. The conference audience consisted of professional user experience designers and developers and the talks and workshops focused on Microsoft user interface technologies such as WPF and Silverlight.

Not only this article is a spontaneous creation – one of the activities I participated in during the conference was, too: Clemens Lutsch, User Experience Evangelist at Microsoft, asked me to join a discussion panel in order to conclude the first conference day and discuss concepts and roles in the UX domain with regard to aspects that are challenges in our daily professional work.

For me this was an excellent opportunity to discuss a term that we have introduced at Centigrade a couple of months ago: “user interface design engineering” or a bit shorter “UI design engineering”. Having used the term just internally in the first place, we started to bring it up in conversations with our clients and partner companies more and more frequently – with great acceptance. When I brought up the term during the panel discussion, I observed similar acceptance from the audience and my co-speakers – almost as if the term closed a gap that many professionals felt has existed for quite some time. It was even picked up by other conference speakers, right the next day, which motivated me to shed some more light on the term and its meaning. So, what is UI design engineering, anyway?

More and more operating systems use a border resembling frosted glass for their windows, like, e.g., the Aero Glass® decoration known from Windows Vista® and Windows 7®. Providing this ‘special effect’ on the Java™ platform is still not easy to realize. Most Look and Feels use opaque borders, which do not visually match the surrounding designs of these operating systems.
This article describes a pragmatic approach to solve to this problem.

In the first part of this series I described how user interface design tools bring together developers and designers in a seamless workflow and gave an overview of the technical environments of Adobe’s and Microsoft’s tools in that area.

In this article, I am going to focus on the use of pixel and vector graphics in design, deal with some of the pros and cons of the two graphic types and finally give an introduction on the scaling of bitmap GUI components.

This series of blog articles deals with the use of GUI development tools by designers and developers, with a particular focus on Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder.

In the first part, I will have a look at the cooperation between designers and developers during GUI creation, describe some issues that can affect their collaboration and point out how GUI design tools can improve the overall design and development workflow.