Recently we just wrapped up a series of demos and talks on customizing the new Silverlight 4 themes and project templates to make your own unique and tailored design solutions. Here is a brief overview of the content demo'd in the first of these series of talks that I did. I will be blogging to give more context around how to design great apps using these themes and templates as starting points. 

 MOOD BOARDS 

 

 

 

DEMO APP DESIGNS

 The demo project is available with this blog post. Aspects covered in this demo iclude:  

 01                 INTRO themes, vision + concepts

                                                Summarize what I'm going to show you 3 things...

  • 1. Quick overview of 4 new Silverlight themes available at microsoft.com
  • 2. Show you how to tweak Cosmopolitan theme based on 4 design variations
  • 3. Show you how to dynamically change your theme at runtime

Demo project available for download on my blog and with this episode 

 02                                   INTRO focusing on Cosmopolitan theme, what's cool about Cosmo?

03                                   Significance of the out-of-box resources structure

04                                   Overview of my custom project structure using: modified Styles.xaml + Behaviors

05                                   How I customized Cosmopolitan theme

06                                  Design 01 tweaks

  • Grid texture : used gradient fill on two layout containers

(one StackPanel background and one Border background) with tweaked start points and end points, SpreadMethod and Mapping points

  • Uppercase behavior + Custom Button and TextBlock styles 

 07                                  02 tweaks

  • Background has solid fill gray color and gradient fill color to give it dimension
  • Uppercase behavior + Custom Button and TextBlock styles 

08                                  03 tweaks

  • Background texture uses gradient fill with tweaked parameters
  • Lowercase behavior + Custom Button and TextBlock styles  

                                        Wrap-Up