Metro apps use a particular design style. Very clean and minimalist. Having one foot firmly in the print industry, I can relate to the Swiss style of simple graphics and clean typography.
I was just about to suggest to the presenter that the film Helvetica was a good reference for this design style when he asked the audience how many of us had seen it. About four hands went up in a crowd of about a hundred and fifty so a low percentage. Personally, I love that film even if it is a little obscure. If you haven't seen it and you're interested in modern graphic design it's a must-see.
Metro is clearly a response to graphics on a low resolution system. Keeping graphics clean and simple makes for good readability on a small form factor regardless of the fact that the phones are quite capable of running computationally demanding three dimensional games.
The days of gel buttons, drop shadows, bevels and halos are over, at least for the moment and frankly, I breath a quiet sigh of relief at that news.
For the phone, Metro is an obvious solution. Metro on the desktop is great, if you never use your PC for anything other than running the apps behind the super large icons or tiles. Metro is definitely not a system for those who make their living with the computer and who need access to deep functionality.
The starkly clean lines and supersaturated colours don't play well with complex tasks.
I was frankly disappointed at the same old same old of the application structures of all the demos. Once again, we are shown the wrong way to create a solid application. Too much intelligence in graphics with lots going on in the code behind. When will MS realise that demos should reflect the real world requirements of software and actually teach best practices from the outset.
Corrina B's design session was informative and showed of the ease with which an application can be crafted by a practice designer using Blend. Again though, I found her session, while fascinating, to be too full of minutiae and not as clear as the clean design that she was trying to promote.
More from me on this subject tomorrow as the 250 mile drive home was a pip.
No comments:
Post a Comment