I recently was lucky enough to win a design consultation courtesy of Nokia DVLUP 

The consultation was with Arturo Toledo, ex Senior UX designer from Microsoft, and how head of Toledo Design. I was really looking forward to the session, as I attended a webinar with Arturo earlier this year, and was very impressed. The conultation took place last week, and although the session was supposed to be an hour, it did run over slightly, as we both got very involved.

Arturo made great use of Expression Design, which is free from Microsoft. Although it is no longer supported, it is a great piece of software, and Arturo certainly knows how to drive it. Generating a great icon from an image took him a couple of minutes, whereas I probably originally spent an hour in paint.net trying to do the same thing.

Arturo had some great ideas to tweak the design on our 'Find A Costa' application. Find A Costa is a 'templated' application, and can be adapted to suit any business very quickly. You can always email for more details on this. The whole session was recorded, and I received a copy of the consultation, plus all the Expression Design diagrams.

I will be changing the template design behind Find A Costa, based on Arturo's recommendations, and will blog about this in a couple of weeks showing the application before and after.

You can also benefit from these consultations by using your DVLUP points for a similar consultation - I would thoroughly recommend it to any Windows Phone developer.

Originally posted 9/Apr/2013