Aero vs Luna
エアロ / ルナ
Both sit in Microsoft UI, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.
Aero
The translucent glass UI of Vista and 7: frosted window frames, live thumbnails and GPU-composited depth making 'through glass' the OS's standard vocabulary.
Luna
Windows XP's look: blue taskbar, green Start button, rounded windows and a meadow wallpaper repainting the gray office machine as household optimism.
| Aero | Luna | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2006–2012 | 2001–2006 |
| Family | Microsoft UI | Microsoft UI |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Frosted frames / Reflections and highlights / Live thumbnails / GPU-composited depth | The blue taskbar / The green Start button / Rounded frames / Meadow-and-sky optimism |
| Best used for | Work screens stacking many windows where the layer beneath must stay visible · Control panels for photo or video apps floated above the content itself | Using early 2000s PC culture as a device for nostalgia · Assembling a bright, friendly home facing screen through saturation |
| Type | Small light labels on the frame, dark enough to survive translucency | Bold sans in white, contrasted hard against the blue ground |
| Composition | Glass only on the frame, content areas kept fully opaque | A horizontal bar along the bottom, one primary control at its left |
| Material | Heavily blurred backdrop, a thin top highlight, a faint tint | Saturated blue and green, frames swelled by rounding and gradient |
| Caution | Spreading translucency and gloss across the whole screen makes legibility shift with whatever moves behind the text, and hides what is clickable. | Copying only the palette while dropping the rounding and swell leaves the colors floating, and none of the optimism arrives. |