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Microsoft.com New Design Preview

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Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#61

Post by Silhouette »

Is this what we have to look forward to with Metro?

The design seems like a children's book combined with some ISP "landing page" from 1995. Everything is big and bold, yet the entire page is almost completely devoid of meaningful content. It's just a vast array of disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole bunch of vast arrays of disorganised links, with no sign of any rational information architecture or even basic scannability.

Sorry, but I just can't find anything nice to say about it. It has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever AFAICS.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#62

Post by mayukh »

Here's one angle..MS has 2 large very different customer sets, the enterprise and the consumer and in the past it seemed that a lot of the UI was some sort of a compromise targeted to both.

The consumer tech group is definitely getting stronger at design .. and the enterprise tech arm can rely on its salesforce

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#64

Post by billpatrianakos »

It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they still after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been forced to use Windows at my new job. I wasn't happy about it but it turns out I've gotten just about as productive with it as any other platform. But the problem is that now, 4 weeks in, I get terrible eye strain and the whole system looks ugly because fonts are jagged except at really large sizes. It's ironic that this new site looks awesome on my iPad and Mac but not so much on their own OS, Windows. Why can't they fix that already?

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#66

Post by tarellel »

Very nice finally something from MS that looks great. The simplicity and clean, clear, and crisp look is definitely a win for me. But it's to little to late, everyone's shifted a lot of their focus to Apple and Google.

BTW I think it's hilarious that they're using modernizer on their site, maybe it's the best choice they've got to cover up some of their own mistakes.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#69

Post by dreamdu5t »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #64

It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they still after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been for…

This is intentional. Windows uses font hinting which attempts to align the anti-aliased font to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally. This is done to maintain readability at small sizes. Apple doesn't use this type of font hinting and applies sub-pixel anti-aliasing proportionately.

See this comparison of the two methods in detail: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi...

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