Yes, I know… I am a developer participating in a design contest… So what? 😉

Since the beginning of my career I have thought of design as a very important skill to have, at least a bit, regarding fundamentals of design, color theory, and most important, user interface design, that fits well with “pure design” and usability & all the related knowledge… with this “base” skillset you can be creative and evolve a creativity process for whatever you want to.

Also I have always loved to create things and this is not limited to software architecture and I love to design & conceive things, it’s a pretty satisfying process.

It happens that Nokia Spain is organizing a contest for creating a design inspired by the colors of the new Nokia Lumia 800 mobile smartphone which is not limited in any aspect. You can read (in Spanish) about this contest here: http://eldadodelarte.blogspot.com/2012/01/demuestra-tu-creatividad-en.html?spref=tw and here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=349720035043739#16064

So… we can do whatever we want! Yay!

Guess what!? I decided to participate and I started some days ago to let my mind wander around for a cool idea!!

To say that I am a proud Windows Phone Geek and I can tell I was there when Windows Phone was presented 1st time at the World Mobile Congress and also I was also at the presentation of Mango… so I have the Tiles & METRO design language very close to my heart… and with this idea I started thinking of a design that I could wear close to my heart and that revived the Nokia Lumia 800 colors – everything all together!!!

After giving a lot of thought and lots of designs in paper I come to a “Tile scenario” over black that went well with the Nokia Lumia 800 design & showcased its colors properly, and went alltogether with the METRO feeling. It has been designed to wear it close to the heart – you will see why in short 😉 – and clearly showcase the love I have for this outstanding device the Nokia Lumia 800 is and its operating system, Windows Phone.
After a lot of designs, tests, playing with tiles, symbols, I came to this:

To mention that I tried to create the tiles using a plastic material on my own buying vinyl plastic tiles of 5cm x 5cm but I failed terribly, tried other materials and well, they did not look good as they reflected too much light (or none at all) so I decided, after trying paperboard & vinyl, to go and order 5×5 tiles at Zazzle.es.
They arrived me the last day of the contest and the quality was good, without flash I have been able to have a clear picture of the creation, which was attached to the sweatshirt through pins – in fact each Tile is a pin.
There is a lot of message in the tiles which are designed to be placed over the heart, meaning clearly “I love Nokia & Windows Phone”.

Additionally I envisioned another design were this design would be well placed and also close to our heart, warm and close to our right hand (or the hand that we most use) and did this other variation of the tiles design:

Obviously, these logos are trademarked and exclusively created for the purpose of this design contest so please do not use them outside of the contest. For this I have created alternative versions without the logos & trade marks that make them unusable outside the scope of the contest.

  

Hope you like them!!