I drew this up recently to illustrate a proposed workflow for a project I’m working on. This is similar to the workflow as proposed by Adobe but with an extra level of responsibility on the Interaction Designer. This being the requirement to adapt their Catalyst work in Flash Builder. This, in my opinion, is a more realistic overview of how most Flex framework projects actually play out nowadays.
Flash Catalyst is not quite powerful enough at the moment to produce flexible, bespoke skins. The chances are you’ll need to build components that aren’t just button skins. You need to write your own SkinnableComponent classes with custom skin parts that resize dynamically etc etc.
I’m afraid, if you want to be a shit-hot Interaction Designer and need to build amazing, re-usable prototypes that can quickly be integrated into the final architecture then you’re going to need to think outside of the Catalyst and get your hands dirty with Spark and the skinning component life-cycle.
Good luck!
There’s a PDF of the images on this post here.
July 13th, 2010 at 11:17 am
I’d like to point out that this was drawn up for a very specific project and team. I know there are a lot of Art Directors out there who would rather die than actually have to produce assets and style guides. They’d never use Fireworks either.