Fluent Design Language Discussion

I saw this image from a recent Microsoft Design blog post and it was inspiring to see the evolution of Metro UI in Windows 10 to Fluent Design in Windows 11.



I personally am a huge fan of Metro UI ever since Zune in 2006. I'm fascinated by how it took some core design principles like "content before chrome" when digital user interfaces were bombarded with too many dropshadows, too much glossiness, and an abundance of pizazz. For example while Apple (and particularly iOS) used a more skeuomorphic design, Metro was digitally authentic. It relied on typography, motion, and minimalist icons to convey what it was trying to say quickly, and it was tremendously effective and there was beauty in its intuitive simplicity.

VS.

However, Metro had its shortcomings. I feel Fluent Design is a worthy successor to Metro. Fluent adds more dimension to all the flatness with light, depth, motion, material, and scale. It elevates the design to feel premium while not losing sight of what made Metro special. An apt evolution of design.

my issue with the metro design on phones are:

• it is screaming at your face.
• occupies every spaces/corners, feels claustrophobic.
• sensory overload. --too big and too many at the same time.

vannn said:

View attachment 3721

my issue with the metro design on phones are:

• it is screaming at your face.
• occupies every spaces/corners, feels claustrophobic.
• sensory overload. --too big and too many at the same time.

Click to expand...

That's a solid critique of live tiles.

I feel there are other elements of Metro though that allow content to breathe a bit more. I'll find some examples to show tomorrow.

Thanks for contributing to the conversation.

I like Fluent more.

Why?
Since I disabled Live Tiles on Windows 10, I'm not looked back.

- Live Tiles is hogging more resources because it is so many moving characters in the Start menu.
- it is also hogging more space in my 900p monitor.. So I switched to Open-Shell start menu.

That's it.

I was a big fan of Win 8 metro style (specially the "menus", which is awful in Win 11).

3D Fluent emojis are great but in big size not in small size, I love it in big size, it is useless in small size in messenger apps! BTW they ruined the Fluent emoji again! At first it was 3D Fluent Emoji then became 2D Fluent Emoji and now (after official release) it is NO-D Emoji! It just shows up in Win "Emoji panel" and "Microsoft Team" and "Office" and "Edge" (what a coincidence)! We can't use it in Photoshop or any other graphic design or 3D design app! It is a single "Unicode Standard" font but you can not use it in any program because they (the apps) can't recognize this "Unicode Standard" font!

Win 8 menu style:


Win 11 menu style (Show more options), just check the awful "Selected item highlight bar"! MS did try to copy it from Mac UI ecosystem but they didn't do that perfectly!