Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals Main Meeting September 2, 2008

Topic: Graphic Design for Developers

Are you a developer yearning to become a dev-igner, a developer/designer hybrid?

The rise of a RIA and enabling technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, and XAML makes the 'battleship gray' UIs we are so familiar with look like the green screens of the 70s and 80s. The old cliché is that developers make poor designers and many developers needlessly tremble at the site of designer tools such as Expression or Photoshop. Graphic design is a process, just like software development. If you learn the basics, you'll soon turn out better User Experiences and find inspiration in the world around you. While I can't make you a design guru overnight, I can help you make your apps look a bit less like they did when the Spice Girls were on the pop charts. Turtlenecks and berets optional.

Presenter: Frank La Vigne

Frank La Vigne is a Microsoft Tablet PC MVP and Lead Architect/Designer for Applied Information Sciences (AIS) in Northern Virginia. Frank started in software development when he was twelve, writing BASIC programs for the Commodore 64. He began his professional career writing Visual Basic 3 applications for Wall Street firms in 1993. He then moved on to be the first webmaster for a major book retailer. Frank then went on to develop a large multinational online banking project in Germany. In 2004, Frank became heavily focused on Tablet PC application development. Frank is also active in the developer community, speaking at user groups and code camps along the East Coast.

Official Website: http://cmap-online.org/Meetings/Details/2008-09-02.aspx