Chapter 2. The Modern UI
This chapter covers
- The Windows Modern Style
- Design principles for Windows 8 apps
- Typography and grid layout
- Device considerations
I’m not a designer. Like many, I can tell good design when I see it, but my promising art skills were tossed out the window and never really developed once I sat down at my first computer and started programming. Had I known then how well computers and art would coexist, I’d have kept pursuing them together.
Regardless, like many of you, I find myself designing UIs for applications on a fairly regular basis. In the days of rigid battleship-gray apps, this was relatively easy to do. As those fell out of favor and we started getting more creative, it became harder to keep up. Part of the reason it was hard to keep up was that there were few working constraints. There was no commonality to design, no framework to work within. Unlimited possibilities can be pretty daunting when you’re not sure where to start.
With Windows Phone and Windows 8, Microsoft has attempted to bring us all back into the fold of a visual framework we can all understand. Those with design talent will still be able to create applications that outshine what the rest of us do, but all of us can now more effectively learn from each other and use the same tools and patterns to create applications. That framework is the Windows Modern Style.