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Microsoft.com New Design Preview

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Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#111

Post by lusr »

Silhouette wrote: post #61

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 b…

"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."

What a ridiculous statement. Of course it's organised. Want to download something to extend a Microsoft product line? Click "Downloads" and choose the product line. Need Support? Click "Support". Want to buy a Microsoft product? Click "Store".

Which use cases exactly are you imagining are not supported by this "vast array of disorganised links"?

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#112

Post by ksec »

karlshea wrote: post #97
cageface wrote: post #76

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

I totally agree about the design language. I work on a Mac most of the day and love my iPhone, but damn does Metro look nice. And it's great seeing that come across with their other products as well.

I think the Design is good on first sight but doesn't carry over with time. It is the excitement in graphics but little in design philosophy. Compare to Android 4.0 and Apple.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#114

Post by ot »

dchest wrote: post #30

I decided to download Movie Maker so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a Downloads menu there. I clicked "All Windows Downloads". (The site is pretty fast, BTW). I selected "Windows 7", then scrolled down until I found Movie Maker. I clicked "Get it now" and it showed me the Movie Maker page. On that page I clicked Download Now, and it started downloading!

Even easier, type "movie maker" in the search box on the top right, 4th result is "download movie maker"

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#115

Post by bmuenzenmeyer »

rplnt wrote: post #107
zackham wrote: post #11

Really nice support of different browser sizes. Resize your browser from wide to really narrow to check it out.

Except one thing that bugs me most on these "responsive" sites. The images are still loaded at their full resolution. Even when I reloaded after I resized the tab. Tried private tab to avoid cache - result still the same - 1600px wide image loaded. It's working really nice and all but I think the point of responsive sites is to make them usable on small, mostly mobile, devices. And we still live in a age when the mob…

In case you didn't know, this is a pressing concern for developers that do care about performance of responsive websites. Take a look at http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/

Scott Jehl of Filament Group just delivered a talk at An Event Apart on Responsible Responsive Design, and released Southstreet, a suite of tools designed to make responsive design more performant. Check it out at https://github.com/filamentgroup/Southstreet

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#116

Post by hebz0rl »

chris_wot wrote: post #87

That's a totally odd font choice they are using. Check out the "d", the "b" and the "p" - looks horrible in Firefox 13! [1] Oh, and it looks terrible in Internet Explorer 8, as the layout is completely out of whack. [2] 1. http://static.inky.ws/image/2290/image.jpg 2. http://static.inky.ws/image/2291/image.jpg

looks fine here (linux/firefox) http://i.imgur.com/zSSgQ.png

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#117

Post by dchest »

ot wrote: post #114
dchest wrote: post #30

I decided to download Movie Maker so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a Downloads menu there. I clicked "All Windows Downloads". (The site is pretty fast, BTW). I selected "Windows 7", then scrolled down until I found Movie Maker. I clicked "Get it now" and it showed me the Movie Maker page. On that page I clicked Download Now, and it started downloading!

Even easier, type "movie maker" in the search box on the top right, 4th result is "download movie maker"

The funny thing is that it's 4th result. The first one leads to some page with "Looking for Movie Maker?" text. The second and the third one lead to some irrelevant pages.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#118

Post by wazoox »

lusr wrote: post #110
zackham wrote: post #11

Really nice support of different browser sizes. Resize your browser from wide to really narrow to check it out.

Although the fonts in Chrome render very poorly on my machine whereas in IE9 they look great...

Same thing to me, Firefox on Linux. The fonts are jaggy.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#119

Post by creamyhorror »

I think one thing conspicuously lacking here (besides rounded borders and gradiented buttons, both of which aren't part of Metro style) is icons. Nowadays most sites use icons to add visual interest to plain text. Microsoft's old designs didn't, and I think they suffered for the lack of them. The new design is refreshing and clean but would still benefit from having some similarly clean and functional graphical elements, i.e. icons.

(Crossposting to their feedback.)

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#120

Post by Goladus »

creamyhorror wrote: post #119

I think one thing conspicuously lacking here (besides rounded borders and gradiented buttons, both of which aren't part of Metro style) is icons. Nowadays most sites use icons to add visual interest to plain text. Microsoft's old designs didn't, and I think they suffered for the lack of them. The new design is refreshing and clean but would still benefit from having some similarly clean and functional graphical eleme…

Personally I hate when icons replace text.
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