A big thank you guys! Tribute to the generosity of you, our community, we now have 50% more skins available for the telerik ASP.NET components. Check out the latest additions in our Skins Exchange Program and feel free to download a copy for your project. Also, don’t forget to vote for your favorite community skin – we have an Xbox and free RadControls licenses waiting for the winners. Voting will close on September, 15th.

Once again, I would like to express our enormous gratitude to everyone who took the time to contribute their custom-made skins to the program. ...

http://internship.dreamture.net is the new blog of this summer's design intern at the UX department here in telerik, where Dimitar Raykov will regularly upload his ongoing work on the weekly internship assignments. Following a successful attempt to accommodate an intern a couple of years ago, this summer we wanted to expand the effort with a program that gives not just a preview of an actual work environment, but also has a more academic side to it with a chance to experiment within the design practice. Before I laid out the program I did some research on existing programs elsewhere but failed to ...

Once again, I am excited to announce the start of a new initiative to improve the user experience with skinning the Telerik controls. We are starting work on a new Visual Style Builder application for the ASP.NET AJAX Controls and a major upgrade of the existing application for the WinForms Controls. The Visual Style Builder will allow easy, point-and-click customization of component skins, eliminating the need to get acquainted with the front-end structure of the controls. The Visual Style Builder will also speed up development of skins across several components - you will be able to define a style once and ...

I am enthusiastic to announce the launch of the Telerik Skin Exchange Program – http://www.telerik.com/skins! We have created a meeting place for community members to exchange home-grown skins for the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX components. We know a lot of you have come up with amazing designs for our components and wanted to enable a platform to show these off and help the community. Seeing the tremendous support you guys give to each other every day on our forums and code library, I am confident you will take up on the initiative so we can build up a useful new ...

It’s that time of the year again and we’re getting ready for the next quarterly release here at telerik. This time we have a major visual update coming for the ASP.NET product line. Almost all skins will get a refresh – some a minor QA to bring back to original designs, others a more thorough facelift. Wanted to get back to you even before the beta release next week with a sneak view of what’s coming so you can have your say. Here’s the major planned changes in skinning:

1. Black skin preserves its general look only gets a bit less….well, ...

With design and User Experience fast gathering momentum as the leading factors behind the success or failure of IT projects, we're continuing efforts here at telerik to make sure the RadControls suites stay at the forefront of presentation layer trends. We have been riding the waves with the introduction of our black skin (ever since Vista and Office 2007, black seems to be the new white in interface design), and we fully support both the Vista and the Office 2007 interface looks - for the web and Winforms.

So what's next? We thought we should ask you. We're running ...

With the Q2 release, we have decided it is time to refresh the look and feel of RadControls components to stay on the edge of the latest trends in visual design for the web. And ever since Vista, black is the new white… so we just had to join in with a trendy new theme for the default skins of our controls. The Q2 2007 skin sports a modern black twist, improved contrast, and larger font-sizes/more generous white space for a touch of web2.0 in your applications.



While we ardently urge everyone to switch to the new look, we do ...

I thought I should drop a line to let you know about our plans for changes in the common skins of the Asp.Net product line. For the upcoming Q2 release this September we are planning to refresh the default look of our controls, discontinue development of two common skins, and add two new common skins in their place.

Default Skin Refreshed
The current default skin (the look of the components when you drop them from the toolbox; browse a preview of all current common skins here) has served well, but the time has come for a fresher look. While we ...

Just came back from this year's webDD event at the Microsoft campus in Reading, UK and wanted to give a big thank you to Dave and Phil and all the organizers for the great experience - it was an insightful weekend with Scott Guthries' news on AJAX and WPFe, and a great chance to check back on industry developments with fellow designers and developers. With web standards and the Rails technology heavily emphasized in the sessions, it was truly refreshing to see in action Microsoft's recent dedication to industry standards and their openness to alternative frameworks. Dave Verwer's lecture on ...

For the last half a year, we’ve been quietly revolutionizing software development here at telerik, trying to integrate a thought about the user on all stages of product development. While we really wanted to improve the User Experience, we were very careful not to go too far with needlessly expensive usability best-practices – we believe the smartest solutions are usually the simplest solutions, so we looked around for a way to measure usability that would not involve furnishing a state-of-the-art recording studio and flying users over continents. For a start, we thought we just needed to observe users interact with ...