What to use to design look and feel for a .NET application?

I've been tasked with designing a new look and feel/navigation for a .NET application that is in the works but I am not sure what the best wa开发者_C百科y to approach this would be.

I'm not a programmer. I have designed webpages through photoshop and am able to convert them to static HTML through limited HTML knowledge.

WPF has been suggested but that would mean I would require a VS license? Would that mean I would need to learn the program too? I have used VB/VBA ages ago briefly.

I assume I can't just do it in photoshop? Or can I?

Do you just need to design the look or implement it as well?

You can design it in anything you like if someone else is going to implement your vision, although you might want to consult with a developer along the way to make sure your vision is actually doable.

If you also need to implement it and WPF is the chosen platform, I suggest looking into Blend which is a UI editor for WPF. You can also create UIs manually using XAML and your favourite text editor, but that's probably more complex than dragging a few controls around in Blend.

I recommend learning Blend and the basics of WPF architecture. Between that and hopefully constant communication with the dev team, you should be good to go. But, there are tools that will allow you to export from Photoshop to WPF-compatible XAML, so that may be worth investigating as well. I don't have personal experience with them, so I can't recommend much or speak to their quality.

Ultimately, the choice of platform and UI toolkit should be up to more than just you. If the company chooses other toolkits for the application such as Silverlight or the older Windows Forms, your options may be somewhat different. Silverlight uses a similar approach to WPF, so Blend can still help you out. With Windows Forms, you're likely going to be limited to just designing mock screenshots or learning Visual Studio.

Personally, I had my biggest improvements when using a 3rd-party-component for GUI elements like DevExpress or Telerik or Infragistics.

(We chose DevExpress after lots of try-and-error).

While I'm no designer, but a developer with some basic design skills, I decided that it is more cost-effective for me to simply use something that is already polished and needs no design work by myself.

On the other hand, e.g. DevExpress has a nice skin editor which you could use in a high-level manner to fine-tune a skin or even design a new skin from scratch.

Update:

It seems that their skin editor only supports Windows Forms but not WPF. For WPF, they only have certain predefined skins.