.toolbox Free online Silverlight/Blend and/or Design training (or the “I’m a developer, can you teach me how to design?” site )

Adam Kinney - .toolbox – Free online Silverlight and Expression Blend training

“Woohoo, the site is live! .toolbox is a free online training program where designers and developers can learn to create Silverlight applications using Expression Studio and to apply basic UX concepts to their solutions.

I was lucky enough to get involved with the project while it was coming together and I’m very excited to see it out there in the wild.  I hope you really enjoy the training content.  This site will be the answer to two questions I am asked often:

• I’m a designer, how do I get started with Silverlight & Blend? .toolbox Design Scenarios
• I’m a developer, can you teach me how to design? .toolbox Design Principles

…”

.toolbox

 

.toolbox – .school

.school – overview

“…

Whether it’s with Design Principles or Design Scenarios, start with basic concepts and techniques to build skills incrementally.

courses

.toolbox features two learning paths: Design Scenarios and Design Principles. Pick a starting point and build your knowledge and abilities as you go. Below is a full summary of training modules for both tracks.

scenarios

Learn the fundamentals of Silverlight and Expression Studio. Start with basic techniques and build your skills to create more advanced applications. Design Scenarios is comprised of four levels that increase in difficulty with three training modules per level. Each module deconstructs a Silverlight application to teach you must-know features and techniques.

…

principles

All great applications start with a foundation in design. The Design Principles track gets back to basics with key design concepts that will help you create slick and functional web applications. Each of the four level groupings contains three modules, each focused on design fundamentals.

…

…”

Here’s one example of a course (Design I)

 

Interesting…

If you are an achievement/badge hound you can earn them by “going to school”. And of course you can share your progress/status on twitter & Facebook.

 

<rant>I really dislike autoplay media on a site’s homepage. Seeing it once it okay, but in browsing the site/content, how many times do I really need to see that intro clip? sigh…</rant>