Silverlight TV 78: Designing Tiles and Splash Screens for Windows Phone (Design Tips Mini Series)

The Discussion

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  For easy emulator screenshots, use the Windows 7 built-in Snipping Tool in the Window Snip mode and take a perfect 480x800 capture when the emulator is at 100%.

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  Thanks for the ep, it's great to see the 'Design Tips Series' back.

  However just as a note here, the 'non-Microsoft apps' never use the Phone Accent Brush (ie theme color) when they are at the app list. They however do when they are pinned to Startup.

  At least that's the behavior I'm having with all the 3rd party apps, I would love to know if it's something I'm missing though...

   

  Karim

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  @kouhbi:That's a bug which has been fixed in Mango.

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  @DannyM: Nice, good to know.

  On a separate note, it's great that you talked about the banding problem which I, personally, used to find annoying. If you've been doing some design, you'll know that there is a few ways to work around it, and like Corina kindly showed it involves overlaying Noise on it so that it removes the uniformity in the bands. However, I would advise Blurring the channels first then add Noise per channel. It tends to generally give better results.

  Also, if the gradients look fine on the emulator then you're good to go. I'm referring to a weird issue that affected HTC devices after NoDo update (to be fixed in Mango hopefully), in which the screen colors turn 16-bit instead of the supposed 32-bit. So in these devices, one is very likely to encounter banding in gradients and should probably not worry much about it as long as it renders fine in the Emulator.

  Sorry for the long post

   

  Karim

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  Great to see a post covering Expression Design.

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  The splash screen that you created didn't show up because there were actually 2 projects with the same name (WeatherApplication_Design_End) open in Expression Blend. Maybe you were working with the other one