I also like the vision of having good graphics/layout staff to pretty up a developers work, but I've never been able to get there. I managed a large project about 10 years ago for a company that had a good graphics dept.

I was hoping for fonts, form layouts, etc., a real nice "corporate voice" tweaking of maybe 15 developers work over that time. After 3 years, all we got were some nice toolbar bitmaps and a splash screen.

It was probably because the existing graphics folks already had full plates and our stuff never was made an official project with a priority. That kind of thing has to have buy in at a pretty high level.

Gary


>I agree, except that I don't see it as viable unless you can afford graphics people and the time delay in the project to get the beautification accomplished. I envision companies hiring one graphics person to start with who will be overwhelmed with work while the developments wait for the graphics portion to be done before their section of the pie is considered completed. Eventually, there may be a graphics department to handle this, but that's not feasible for smaller businesses. Perhaps a new tool that MSFT can charge even more $ for will be released to replace the graphics person so that one will no longer be required.
>
>
>>I have followed this discussion since the beginning and, imo, the whole point of wpf is to separate the ui from presentation. You need 0 degree of graphics design experience to use wpf. You can drop a regular ugly old button anywhere on the form, code the logic and when done, anyone with graphics experience can take the xaml and make the button look beautiful, position it where they want, and when done, the code behind will still work because they don't touch the code when doing the graphics work. This is the whole philosophy behind wpf and a good one.