in homage of metro design

this is probably nostalgia, but I really liked metro, the design language microsoft used around 2010 to 2017 (in no small part because my first smartphone was a windows phone)

people say it was the worst offender in the trend towards "minimalist flat" design we have today, but for me it was actually one of the biggest victims of the overall trend plus a lot of misunderstanding. a lot of it sucked, not because it was bad, but because most attempts at doing it got more and more botched over time, until it was only a vague memory of its former self

the true vision

the thing about metro, is that it wasn't just "coloured rectangles with monochrome icons". it was about minimising the ui elements in favour of focusing on information, making heavy use of bold typography and lyout for hierarchy, what should be front and center is not the fancy gradient effects of this play button, but the album art; if you want to determine what information is most important don't decorate it, make it big, if you want to make pages navigatable make them visually connected to each other as part of a big canvas

the best examples of it, and what it should have been, are the zune and windows phone 7/8 uis

clean but not sterile

the main thing that metro was, was a contrast to the previous skeumorphic style, the almost 3d panels to simple rectangles, the intricate textures to flat colours, the photorealistic icons to logograms

it was all that, but it wasn't about being unfun, it was about making the fun out of something more subtle, the layout. the use of white space, assymetric items, massive text, elements that would overflow the view, whole screen animations, that is where the fun went, and even then there still would be some decoration like gradients and layering, it wasn't all flat

the ui elements in isolation are simple, but the overall composition much more nuanced and unique

the botched execution

the thing about nuance, is that it is hard to keep around, and when you have such an intricate design that makes use of practically invisible elements, it gets hard to keep everything to the same level of quality, especially over time in the corporate tech world

over time with later iterations of metro microsoft and all the designers that wanted to copy it watered it down, gone the wild layouts and in with the grid, down with purposeful typography and welcome in dozens of monochrome icons, away with that negative space and overflow as everything shall be fitted into neat boxes, and so on, who needs nuance when now anyone with excel could make a ui?

you can see it windows 8, the star example of how bad metro can be (also in trying to shove a table ui on a pc), it had the tiles, but metro wasn't just the tiles, and in every other aspect it was a bastardised version with none of the inspiration

and then come windows 10, microsoft pretty much gave up on it, they kept the "everything is square and monochrome" (except in all the parts it wasn't, because of course) and nothing more, not even a hint of fun and intricate, only bog standard layouts that were safe but absolutely soulless (even more soulless than they already were)

the material of hope

I'll be honest, after a decade of watered down minimalism, google's material 3 (aka material you, aka material 3 expressive, who knows, google sucks at naming things) was quite a neat departure, not necessarily a breath of fresh air as it still is very much corporate, but finally another design language that tries to be fun, that puts emphasis in typography, layout, motion, and goes for a more 'messy' look

it is not perfect, and not everything made with it will be good (it takes some creativity to make an app that is not just a grid but now with rounded corner), but it certainly is a nice direction that I wish more people would take a hint of. not a true successor to real metro, but certainly learned from quite a few of its points. it is not subtle and it is very playful, and that makes it better than every minimalist sleek modern ui today