Do you have an artist/​Designer on your team?

I work in a team of about 10 dev/testers.  What with all the new WPF goodness and the need to start a major update of our product the idea of getting a someone with real design skills on the team has been thrown around.  One of the biggest problems is that there might not be enough work to keep them busy past the initial redesign.

So I was just wonder what other people with the same team sizes do about art/design work, do you have a full/part time designer, do you contract the work out?   Do you find that there is enough to keep them busy?  What we would really like is a combined graphics designer and end user documentation/help writer, do you find that these are complementary skill sets?

In the past, when I worked for small companies, or companies where there's < 7 devs, design & looking good is only an afterthought.

You can't do that with WPF anymore. WPF raised the bar. Which is good. I totally expect more independent design companies to get much more work.

I did work for a consulting company with around 20 devs, and they did have a separate design team. But if you're a consulting firm, you gotta have one of them.

Have you thought of contracting the work out? Or contracting with some one to come in just for your redesign faze? That way you’re ensured to get the work done but not feel obligated to keep some one around while there is no work to be done.

A couple of our developers have design backgrounds, but since none of the WPF tools are on MSDN, we won't be switching any time soon.  Even in small shops, having someone with design/UI skills is really helpful when it comes to user buy-in.  If the app does what it needs to do and it looks cool, users are a lot more willing to learn the new app.  We noticed our apps were much more easily accepted when we started building apps that didn't look like they were made for Windows 95.

It sure seems that microsoft is slowing/killing the adaption of WPF by not putting the WPF tools on MSDN subscriptions.  We would LOVE to switch to it, but after signing up all the devs on MSDN, mgmt doesn't want to buy additional MS tools.  I'm starting to understand why people refer to MS as M$.  I hate it, but sometimes it fits.  It pains me to say that too as I am a huge fan of MS products.

sirhomer wrote:



Minh wrote: I You can't do that with WPF anymore. WPF raised the bar.

Designing what? Three-dee applications with shader effects that do your taxes for you?