I’m a designer and I’m been to a design school that taught both traditional art and digital art. Developers don’t go to that sort of school because it would be boring for them.

Its as simple as left brain/right brain thinking. Your right brain is more visual and intuitive while your left brain is more verbal and analytical. In 15 years, I have only met one person who could really effectively do both with beautiful results that would pass the marketing muster.

Hire designers for design and developers to make it work.

The whole idea of a devsigner was brought about by execs and managers looking to save money on personnel and the result in the end was mediocrity for the product.

Of course HTML5 isn’t quite fully supported in all the major browsers just yet. And there are a couple things I’m not sure about with HTML5. Will it be possible to handle webcams / microphones? And what about full-screen mode? That’s something that both Flash and Silverlight 4 can do, which is kind of a big deal.

Beyond that perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of Silverlight & Flash is the ability to build Desktop (or out-of-browser) apps on the same technology. In other words, you can build a Flash app and distribute basically the same app in Adobe Air for the desktop. Or you can build a Silverlight app and run it out of browser even easier.

Also in both Flash & Silverlight there is some extremely rich functionality built into the runtime. Often it’s the kind of thing that can also be done in HTML5, but it’s not built-in. That means that you’ll be building this stuff from scratch or tapping into (potentially very large) js libraries. It’s a compromise no doubt and as always I contend that your choice of tools should depend on the nature of the app you’re building.

When I can target open standards which are clearly on the ascent, why would I commit my talent for design to a proprietary product that’s encumbered by patent concerns and is completely tied to a relatively low tech platform (Windows) that’s in what appears to be in gradual but inexorable decline?

But Silverlight had nothing to do with my interest to dip my feet in both worlds, it simply gave me a new outlet. It gives me the flexibility to focus on the design and development side of things without worrying about all the differences between browsers, operating systems, etc. Much like Flash, it’s done an excellent job of abstracting the most annoying incompatibilities away, and just does what I tell it to do and looks how I want it to look. But unlike Flash (or Flex), making Silverlight do what I tell it to do is just plain easier.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by MossyBlog: Silverlight is creating a mutant designer who can code. – http://bit.ly/5Fu8kz...