

Modern Design at Microsoft - img
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/stories/design/

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kristianc
To judge by this page, Microsoft's vision of Modern Design involves very
little meaningful content on the page as you load it, sideways scrolling
(which interferes with the Mac Back/Forward gesture), and tiny text in a serif
font.

Something like the way GDS Design Principles is laid out strikes me as a
modern approach. Clearly written, responsive, and designed for the web.

This, on the other hand, is a complete turd. Obscure, only readable on a
desktop, and has walls of text. Reminds me of the full flash sites of the
early 00s.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples](https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples)

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epo
For the youngsters among you, this is in fact a very old design discipline
which was used to organise what were called _books_. Unlike books, which were
bound collections of fixed size _pages_ (done for compactness and strength),
this is an emulation of what used to be called a _scroll_ , a much older form
of organising text which was abandoned as impractical as soon as we figured
out book binding.

So Microsoft are emulating an archaic and impractical form of information
presentation and calling it _modern_ , how typically Microsoftian. Unless of
course, this is a rare example of Americans using the word 'irony' correctly,
in which case, bravo!

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McPants
To be fair, design is an evolutionary process. Anything and everything ever
designed was at least partially influenced by the designs that came before it
almost to the point of copying, which is a good thing to me.

The definition of modern that they use does not mean "The newest design that
has never been produced before". Their definition falls more under the lines
of zeitgeist, where it is the design that represents the common theme of the
current time we live in. This is of course completely subjective, but if you
look at all the flat design that is out there it can be argued to be true.

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chiph
Shiny new look (which I like, BTW) layered on top of the cruft that is Win32.

As great a job that Microsoft has done with maintaining compatibility with
legacy apps, at some point you have to introduce something new. I'd like to
see a new systems API on top of the kernel that is object-oriented, and
perhaps has single-level store and is processor architecture agnostic so I
only have to ship one image for both Intel & ARM.

~~~
blibble
uh, isn't that exactly what the new Windows 8 approach is?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime)

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bokito
Am I the only 1 that waited a few minutes? Till I noticed you should scroll
sideways....

