It’s no secret that our custom software development team gets pretty excited about new technical releases of products, software, mobile applications. Pretty much anything new in technology means we’re going to read all about it, and incorporate it into how we do business. This is why we are so excited for the Windows® Phone 7 release (you’ll know my fellow mobile app development blogger is excited too!). Through the use of Microsoft® Silverlight® mobile, the Windows Phone release will include a totally different system of interaction, called Hubs.

I read quite a few articles about this new release, and I noticed that many of them were incredibly technically written, meaning mostly written for custom application developers. What does this mean to the normal user? I decided I’d do a bit of a translation into more understandable terms, and explain the huge impact that Silverlight and the hub interface will have on the future of creative mobile design.

Hub Interface

Split your home screen into aggregated sections (Phone, People, Messaging, Games, Calendar to name a few). It means that it will present a variety of options under each of the hubs. Say you want to look under the People tab. It will have an option to go to all of your contacts, call, text, send email or find out more about your contacts. If you want to go to your games, you can access any of them or buy more directly from within the same screen.

High quality video and audio using a wide range of codecs, DRM and IIS Smooth Streaming

Fast, incredibly smooth video and audio that will play in different media players and media with digital rights management tags (media downloaded from say iTunes™, Amazon®, etc.).

Deep Zoom for enhanced reading and photo browsing

Want to look at the shingles on your house? Now you can do it on your phone.

Vector and Bitmap graphics and animation

This is how you can see the shingles. Vector and bitmap graphics and animation will incorporate images with significantly higher quality that scale no matter how far you stretch them.

Multi-touch capability

Now you AND your friend can play a game against one another on your phone, at the same time.

What does this mean for creative graphic design?

Because designing custom graphics and intuitive interfaces for mobile phones is already a completely different ball game, the release of the Windows Phone, Silverlight on Mobile and the ‘Hub’ system could also change the design paradigm.

Photos and Video

It really raises the bar on the quality that users will be expecting, and what graphic design companies will need to create for their clients: higher resolution, better quality sound and more attention to detail.

Designing for Hubs

This will mean that graphic designers, particularly user interface development designers will have to aggregate many functions of a particular topic (Say the ‘People’) into one intuitive ‘Hub.’ They will have to balance screen real estate, user interaction, many functions on one screen and overall look and feel.

Designing for Multi-Touch

This means intuition to a whole new level. If you are designing a mobile application, you will have to think about not one, but two people interacting with it at once. It means that many of these new multi-touch designs will have to be broadly gesture-based, because people make similar, but not exact motions.