进一步完善
有些理念要实现有些则要放弃。

Settling more into the concept and deciding on what should and shouldn’t be done. Some early ideas in terms of defining a visual language and a direction for the visual design to head into.

The semi-transparent overlay in the middle shows the first class support for alpha transparency in WPF. Everything that has color, or a fill, can also have an alpha mask that is seen throughout. This means you can also have opacity masks—or transparencies that have a gradient alpha.

增加一些颜色
    Expression Blend可以帮助设计师很快地完成草稿。另外WPF还有3D设计功能，比如下图左边一栏，可以很直观地看出每个系列中有多少张照片。3D制作很好的整合在整个工具中，设计师完全不需要另外一个工作程序来完成。

Now, I add a splash of color—and make quick prototypes of the controls using Expression® Blend™ to get a feel for things. This allows an interaction designer to better understand the problem domain and make better choices in terms of usability. I and thirteen23 believe that the best interaction designers work in tools that allow them to tinker.

One of the interesting things to note here are the volumetric sets on the left. Our challenge was to build a control that quickly identified how big the set was (how many photos it contained) in a glance. So, we built a volumetric set. Given WPF’s 3D capabilities we were able to easily accomplish this. The 3D layer is so integrated that the workflow is still the same. Traditionally, to add 3D you would have to jump to a different workflow or use some hack. Now, it’s all there…Simple.

Integration And Collaboration

As mentioned, the interaction design is elevated to a different role. The designer now has the ability to get directly into Expression Blend and do exploration incorporating their own ideas before they surface them to a team-level discussion. Essentially what you get is Photoshop on steroids. Same fidelity—but it’s real.

On a final note, it is important to realize that .png’s are not dead. Not in the least. Vectors are great, but WPF has also been built from the ground up to have blazing .png rendering speed. Almost so that I have never seen comparable results. That’s something to wrap your head around.

Final Image

And, magic…You get beautiful stuff. The final stage is to get the developer in Visual Studio® to make it a reality. Whatever projects have been created in Expression Blend can be seamlessly opened in Visual Studio. Perfect.