Wet Ink Design

The Uber Glass Orb

Go ahead and install Silverlight by clicking on the tab below. It only takes a second.

Any photoshop designer worth his weight knows how to design a glass orb. I found a really cool one on one of my favorite photoshop tutorial websites and instead of creating it in photoshop, I decided to challenge myself. Let's see if I can make this thing in Expression Blend and add a rollover effect to it.

To be honest, most of the designs I see on the Silverlight sites are not created by designers but instead by developers trying to be designers. Let me be frank, most of tutorials for silverlight around the net are geared toward developers and not much emphasis toward good solid 2.0 modern type designs.

So I found the design for this glass orb on Good-Tutorials.com and just by looking at the design, attempted to recreate it. This blog post is not a step by step tutorial on how to do this in blend but just to give a run down, I started out with a sphere and added a complex gradient to get the reflection of the base of the orb.

Then I added a series of additional spheres and gradients on top of that. The reflection enhancements were created with paths in Blend 3 and they added the final touch.

While Blend 3 doesn't give you all the options for creating mind blowing graphics such as Photoshop or Flash does, you can still design very good elements for you Silverlight project with what it does offer. I can hardly wait for the next version of Expression Blend and see what further developements the Microsoft team puts together.

Feel free to download the orb at the following link and explore the solution in Blend 3.

Download Solution File (free)

Please leave me any comments you may have concerning the Uber Orb