August 25th, 2009
Tighter integration for tighter products.
In a nutshell, here’s my creative process: We sit around, and think of an idea. Then I’ll spend a little bit scribbling sketches on a whiteboard and doing a very preliminary wireframe to define a core set of features, then it’s off to the formal design stage with my creative team. After making something snazzy in Illustrator or Photoshop, I throw the files to Jack and his team and wait for them to do their dev magic. It works well enough, except for a habit I seem to have…
While I’m waiting for that cake to bake, I start thinking of shiny things I’d like to sprinkle on top. Usually these ideas start small, but before too long, I’m adding functionality that we didn’t think of during the design phase. Stuff that’s awesome and would make the product better. And sometimes, bless his heart, Jack is able to incorporate this stuff, but alot of the time shouting and door slamming ensues.
Stepping back, it’s a simple enough problem to understand. Resources, especially at a small shop are finite, and budgets and timeframes are always tight. I can’t very well expect that half of the team to drop everything and squeeze in late minute additions (even if they are almost universally bad ass) when they’re already in the middle of a project plan– unless I get in there and lend a hand. If I can offload upfront grunt work, they should accommodate my (sweet) last minute requests a little down the road.
Starting with manageable assets is probably a good first step.
My maiden voyage importing Illustrator files into Blend
Jack gave me a little advice- mainly to keep my original art as clean as possible, clear extra stuff off the art board, work on one screen at a time, etc. Honestly, I was a bit hesitant. Even my (much) earlier attempts at bringing illustrator into Flash broke something at some point or another. I had a sample UI with gradients, transparencies- nothing too exotic, but definitely a little more than stacks of solid colored blocks.
It imported just fine. Pixel perfect, in fact. The only downsides- groups get lost in translation, so all of my converted type was imported as a pile of individual assets, and buttons with icons on them all got separated. The icons themselves, for that matter were broken apart into individual bits. It all looked good visually, but I can understand what Jack is saying when he says it takes a couple hours of his time to go get everything ready for manipulation.
My task was to take the big pile of things and make a nice nested orderly pile of objects. Coming from a flash background, I’m familiar with objects/movieclips/buttons, but at this stage of my xaml career (ha) I haven’t really ventured beyond “canvases”. Jack tried to explain the metaphor to me but it shot over my head. I was busy spending 20 minutes trying to figure out whythings were stacked backwards in my list (PRO TIP: that little button with the arrow at the bottom of the object list let’s you choose whether to sort up or down).
Anyhow, aside from a couple weird quirks- sometimes objects would shoot to random areas of the canvas when I reordered them, and some assets imported as children of an existing canvas, it was pretty simple, albeit time consuming.
But I’ve now earned an hour to make last minute feature requests. Check out the before and after!
