I'm a fan of the metro look in general, clean and simple. It can work as a web framework, and this one does a pretty good job of it. A few things of note: 1) The hover effect over the colored blocks feels odd, almost like the default blue border around image links. 2) ListViews seem under-styled with poor spacing. Perhaps this is intended 3) The ApplicationBar is pretty sharp 4) The text-color on all the button style…
This is so much better than the top comment "This is an abomination." and a much better critique. I think pg should create a filter to weed out all comments which have stuff like "I'm not trying to be a hater/douchebag/downvote me/rude/etc but".
In my experience on HN, there aren't enough quality posts on design. In fact, a lot of the most upvoted ones promote poor practices. I've stopped basing whether or not I go into a design threads on the upvotes, because some of the most beautiful projects I've seen have collected dust here, while others thrive despite their rampant shortcomings.
This is basic UI design in the form of basic CSS. You would be seriously hardpressed to find a more generic branding standard than one that relies on simple solid blocks and white text, something that can be pulled off in decades-old browsers, and here we have a website that a) illustrates a lack of understanding of the UI itself and b) a lack of understanding CSS, which makes up the framework.
Honestly if I worked in a studio that was doing work for Microsoft and asked a designer to create these web assets, I would send them back to the drawing board if this is what they presented to me. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of these "negative" comments. It looks and works like a last-minute homework assignment, especially for something where everything is already defined for you in public branding documentation and on Microsoft's own websites.
How am I supposed to say that without coming off as a jerk?