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Designers aren't evil. Let me say that again for those developers out there: Designers aren't evil. Their job is hard just like yours. The problem is that designers and developers haven't had the tools to work together before. The rough answer to that problem for the past few years in Silverlight has been Microsoft Expression Blend. But that's only been part of the story.

With Blend 4 Beta, these fonts are installed in your system fonts directory, and they are also included in the SketchFlow project templates. That means that these fonts are automatically embedded in any SketchFlow project you create.

Microsoft Expression Blend 3 has a great feature – SketchFlow. It allows creating gorgeous prototypes for Silverlight and WPF applications. But it has some disadvantages like shortage of controls. For example, there are no sketching GroupBox controls in Silverlight and WPF sets, sketching DataGrid (Silverlight and WPF) etc.

In the current Blend 4 beta release, there is no special project template for prototyping of Windows Phone applications. But it is very easy to set up a Silverlight prototype to have the right aspect ratio for phone applications and use this as the base.

I’m working on a Silverlight demo LoB application as a part of my bachelor thesis and I made a UI prototype with a couple of screens containing sample data and some basic functionality like navigating through screens, autocomplete boxes, some pop-up windows…

You never know what hijinks are in store when Adam Kinney and John get together. In this episode, Adam makes his theatrical return to Silverlight TV and claims to have filmed the best Expression Blend 3 video ever!

This “mind map” aspect always is an important aspect for me in designing UX – I like to think about the abstract flow, navigation and composition (in other words, the structure) of a design first, without immediately thinking in terms of concrete UI, controls and layouts. Early on, it often does not matter much which exact widget you use to navigate or interact.

Katrien De Graeve has started a SketchFlow series of posts and here is her intro post.

SketchFlow projects can be either in WPF of Silverlight. Let’s focus on a Silverlight version here and look at the differences of a SkechFlow project between other ‘normal’ Silverlight projects.