Metro Style Icons for Windows Phone

Images sizes: 48x48 with centered 26x26 pictures
Compatibility: Windows 8, Windows Mobile, WP7
Background: transparent

File formats: PNG
Colors: white
Icon quantity: 844
Price: $99.00 / 79.00 EUR

Metro Style Icons for Windows Phone is a collection of professionally designed application icons meeting all of the requirements of the WP7 and Windows 8 operating systems. The icons have the right size, the right color, their content areas are perfectly centered and they are all 100% ready to be used in your applications.

All the icons are 48 x 48 pixels, mostly transparent, with the actual image located in a central square of 26x26 pixels. Technically, developers get 844 unique application bar icons drawn in required style, each coming in PNG file format.

Design Guidelines for Application Bar

You can add an application bar to your page both from XAML and code behind. There are some design guidelines for Application bar a developer must know about before designing and developing their Windows Phone application.

Application Bar has an in-built animation and rotation support. So, use it to keep consistency across all Windows Pone applications.

Always use an image of White color with Transparent background. If you have a different theme set for your phone, the Application Bar will colorize them accordingly.

Use 48 x 48 icon images with the actual image content placed within a center area of 26x26 pixels.

Never draw the circle for the icons as that is drawn by the Application Bar itself.

Use icons for most common commands. You can place only 1 - 4 icon buttons in the panel. Hence, if you want more than 4 commands to put in the Application Bar, use the Menu item for the additional actions.

Don't place more than 5 menu items in the application bar. This will create a scroll bar in the UI and the user will have to scroll to click on the items.

Don't add more than 20 characters in the menu items, as it doesn't have support for advance Text formatting like Trimming and/or Word Wrap.

Remember that, as the Application bar is not a Silverlight control, you can't use data binding for text. You have to hard code the text in XAML.

If you want localization support for your Application bar, you have to set the text from code behind dynamically.

Set opacity of Application bar to '0' (zero) if you want the bar overlaid on top of the page. Set it to '1' (one) if you want the page to properly adjust itself outside the covered area of application bar. image

Also remember that, all text items will be converted to lower case while running. So, never think it to be a bug.

Using Stock Icons in Your Project - Use Perfect File Formats in Your Project

It is not very easy or simple to choose the right set of stock images. Have you any idea what file format, what resolution, color depth or image style to use for the development of your application. There are many questions asked by most of the developers where to use 32-bit icons with alpha-channel and what file format should be used for the development environment. Well for a website development you can use 32-bit icons in PNG format. You can also resort to 24-bit PNG icons if supporting old browser is really important. Eight bit GIF files should be used for building lightweight website in mobile platforms. You should remember that GIF files don't have a full alpha-channel support. The GIF icons will look very elegant on any back ground but you can also add your own version if you have a colorful background and want to blend your image with it.

Thus, 32bit icons are a right kind to use and real question is if you may use them for the project. In actuality, 32bit icons are used in handful of cases - and will not get used in others. In case, you are making the site, then the chances are your target audience has the compatible Web browsers, which will display 32bit graphics with the full alphachannel support. The exceptions are far or between, as well as include the Internet Explorer6 and the earlier versions, actually old builds of the Mozilla, and some resource stranded platforms (though most of the mobile platforms will still display 32bit images).

For the Web site, you will make use of 32bit icons in the PNG format and in case, supporting old browsers is very important, you may resort to 24bit PNG icons, and converting original 32bit images with icon editing tool like IconLover.