The Sunday Night News

by Don Burnett

 

And the Chicago winner is... Clarity Consulting..

Well this has been a crazy busy week for me. I spent Sunday through Thursday at the Chicago Phizzpop Design Challenge, Mentoring and documenting the event?   So where's the content you ask? It's in the pipeline. Instead of the usual blogging I decided to do it in video diary form. Since all of the other events aren't getting exactly the same level of coverage, I have decided to do the coverage of the Chicago Challenge in video diary form, to give you some perspective on how hard the teams worked. This was a bit of a challenge at first because a few of the teams decided to work off-site, making covering them and the other contestants (and giving the same level of coverage impossible). I wanted to document the event so the average person could follow the competition from start to finish and get an idea of how the contestants would be working from the training days to the actual competition hours before the first person ever entered the doors at the Underground event.

What can you learn from doing this? Well a whole lot! Not just how the teams did a great job under tremendous working pressure, but how they scaled their presentations to fit the working knowledge they had of the technology and how they could fit such a comprehensive challenge into one short presentation. I would like to say that each and every team did a tremendous job, on a very large and difficult set of parameters set forth by the challenge. I will be profiling three of the teams who were on-site including Clarity Consulting.

It was obvious those at home with the Microsoft toolset and who had previous exposure found the workflow easier and more effective to get their designs completed and out the door. Those that experienced the "learning curve" associated with being new to these tools also seemed to find they had more flexibility in the both the way they worked and the many options they had to approach their problems from different directions.

I asked the teams what they liked about the tools and for a "first generation product" most of them found the Expression Studio (and Blend specifically) very easy to work with after they learned about ordering of timelines and events. The most prevalent comment I got while talking to the teams a couple of days in to their work was they really felt the new workflow between their developers and designers/artists extremely easy and after a few iterations of work they realized that they weren't going to have the "work collisions" they had using other products for design and development.

Look for the video diary up on Phizzpop.com very soon. I am busy editing the content and encoding it (with Expression Media Encoder of course) and the content will be up very very soon. I am sorting through about 4 gigs of 720p HD footage to find the best highlights and tell the story. I expect some pictures up before the actual video.

Technorati tags: Phizzpop, Design Challege, Chicago, Video Diary, Winner is Clarity Consulting