A problem many developers have when building an App for the Windows Phone platform is creating a highly engaging look and feel that is going to co-exist happily with the phone’s native Windows design language.
Your first port of call for inspiration and guidance on designing great layouts for your app should be the Photoshop templates. Provided here are 28 layered Photoshop template files which showcase the many controls that are part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. There are also additional templates that include help and advice on how to maintain the consistent look and feel across applications, but also inspire to innovate on these themes.
Perhaps the best way to give your app a really slick interface and help make it stand out from the crowd is to utilise the panorama control. The panorama control is new to Silverlight and provides some of the best examples of the new Windows design guidelines in action. It can be made up of a single background colour or, for greater impact, an image that spans the whole panorama, is appropriate for your app and is not going to distract from the UI.
For a typical 4 secti on panorama the image should have a 16×9 aspect ratio and it’s always advisable to use a transparent black or white filter to aid text legibility. Other elements can be added to the panorama in the form of tiles such as a logo and text and the sections provide the content areas for adding UI elements to browse and explore the app’s functionality.
Another consideration when designing your app is whether your user has the light or dark theme and how this will affect your user’s experience. There are two ways to approach this consideration; firstly you can make sure that all the design elements you create sit nicely on both the dark and light themes or, secondly, you can design your app for light and dark themes, detect your users theme and present your app design to match their theme.
[...] Step 1: Designing your App Step 2: Laying out elements in Expression Blend Step 3: App styles Step 4: Adding the glossy elements [...]