[AccessD] User interface

Hi Arthur and Jim

Really? I find GMail to represent an horror example of bad (or lacking) design - with a mess of colours, buttons and pop-ups everywhere, yellow and green bars, boring fonts. No style.
Contrary to this, the redesigned live.com (hotmail etc.) is a good example on how very similar pages can appear much lighter and neater by use of a simple tricks like careful colouring and shading, stylish fonts, and just a few frames (with right-angled corners; round corners should be forbidden by law!).

Currently Microsoft is way ahead of anyone else regarding design with Windows Phone 7 and now Windows 8 as the stellar examples of the Metro project. Even the ribbon has proved right for me as I'm now able to use PowerPoint which I previously stayed off. Now it is even fun! That tells it all.

The interesting and encouraging part is, that this is the result of hard work by several teams of very skilled and brave persons, not just some fancy ideas. They are being bashed from many sides which - could one believe - want Windows 3.11 and Word 2.0 back. MS management deserves credit for having promoted design to have top priority.

/gustav


>>> fuller.artful at gmail.com 02-09-2011 21:28:01 >>>
I think of Google as the UI par excellence. Lean and clean and decidedly not noisy. I admire their design sense immensely.

A.