If “designer” isn’t currently on your resume, you may not realize that developing and publishing an app means you are a designer – you designed your app! With the many tools available to Windows Phone developers, it’s easy and quick to get started creating apps, but good design often is overlooked. Visually appealing apps are critical, and can help increase downloads.
We’ve built our unified set of design principles into our developer resources to help make it easy for you to build beautiful apps, and not only for Windows Phone. You can – and should! – apply Microsoft design principles to apps you create for both Windows Phone and Windows.
To get started, check out the following design resources:
- Windows Phone Design Lead Corrina Black’s 2013 BUILD talk on Design for Developers
- The Windows Phone 8 Design Bootcamp on Channel 9
- Design on the Windows Phone Dev Center
- UK Nokia Champion Matt Lacey’s recent article, including sample code, on Practical ways to make a basic app better
- Microsoft Design Lead Dave Crawford’s Designing for Windows Phone: Tips & Tricks
- Nokia’s Designing for Windows Phone in the Nokia Developer’s Library
- … and, if you are really interested in a deep tutorial on design, told from an outstanding “design for developer” standpoint, check out these videos from Robby Ingebretsen, on .toolbox.
The very best apps show an attention to design and user interaction that help make them successful. The resources we’ve listed here give you the basic information you need to improve your app quality, or you can use them to create an outstanding new app. A little bit of conscious design planning can go a long way in terms of improving the quality and performance of your app.