For the past 2 weeks I've been testing the Windows Phone Device in depth. There were nice things I liked such as the Welcome Screen.

But the Windows Phone SDK doesn't support Welcome Screen customization so my options were:

  • Wait for WP8 SDK (maybe there you can find something useful about customizing the welcome screen if available)

  • Or let the Windows Phone Design Team know about my interest.

I already did the second thing, but there was no response:


noresponseWindowsPhone.png

Anyway, now I am going to talk about where this idea came from.

I like trips (especially small ones where you can take photos to share when returning home).

While I was hanging around a local town hereabouts I saw a newly-built house in a corner where I was turning. I saw this and took the photo, edited later on a design application:

brickWindowsPhone.jpg

So, I decided if I can arrange WP Tiles just like that then I'd make it!

So the story of my "Brick" theme comes from a photo I recently took.

So afterwards I've designed a 780X480 sized image file to determine if I can arrange them according to the reference image.

Not much similar but close to it:

capwpWindowsPhone.png

So, I got the feeling that I've arranged 3X6=18 tiles (120X120 sizes for each) in a Grid successfully.

Now my vision of a Bricks theme was successfully implemented.

Now, I had another concern:

I had to create a similar Welcome Screen Prototype so that I can navigate between the Welcome Screen and the Applications page as it is in Windows Phone 7.

I had 2 alternatives:

  • Create a Panoroma Project

  • Create a ScrollViewer and 960X780 sized Grid inside.

If I had used Panoroma then it wouldn't really show Navigation just like in a Windows Phone Welcome Screen.

So I took the other one: I created a ScrollViewer and a Grid.

The grid had a 960 width so that I could also design an Apps section.

So I did.

But in the end; there were 2 Grids and 2 ScrollViewers. Why?

Because while 1 grid and scrollviewer is used for Horizontal Navigation, I had to create another Scrollviewer object for Vertical Navigation to make it look like the Apps page in Windows Phone 7.

So I did.

Later I made some modifications and removed Arrows.

Ok, time to make a demo (Watch the video below):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYqyPBl4yBw

As I said before I've built a prototype not very similar to WP, but I had to show you somehow.

You can also Download the Prototype (above with downloadable source code) and test it locally.

So?

What do you think about my "Bricks" theme for Windows Phone?

I do hope Microsoft supports Welcome Screen Customization so that I can by myself implement my own designs inside.
Not to mention; I designed 4 Different Welcome Screens for Windows Phone.

"Bricks" was one of them...