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Announcing Chicago SilverLight!

Sandy — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:13:55 +0000

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks, please stay tuned!

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ChiSilverlight
Eventbrite: http://chicagosilverlight.eventbrite.com/

Design 101 at cnug

Sandy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:21:02 +0000

I spoke tonight at CNUG out in the burbs and promised that I would post my materials up for people to download and check out links. Below you will find my Powerpoint slides, as well as some links for deeper reading on form layouts and other things I mentioned in my presentation. Thanks for having me out to talk, I hope everyone took away something valuable!

PowerPoint deck: CNUG_Design101.pptx (396K)

Color tools:
The one I used in the demo: http://kuler.adobe.com
An alternative: http://www.colourlovers.com/
A link for the colourlovers Blend plugin: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd421877.aspx

Form layout information:

Luke Wroblewski’s very awesome blog post:http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html

A review of form layout methods with usability eye-tracking data: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php

Other links:
The 5 Second Test: http://fivesecondtest.com

Codeapalooza Coming Up!

Sandy — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:02:34 +0000

Check out http://www.codeapalooza.com/ for information on Codeapalooza, Chicago’s Day of .NET community event on September 6th. This FREE one day event will be hosted at The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Wheaton Campus. The site is being updated daily with information about speakers and sessions and it’s shaping up to be a pretty awesome event! Head to their site to see for yourself and sign up.