Microsoft UI
Twenty years of the Windows surface swinging from added roundness and translucency toward an information first approach built out of type and empty space.
Dictionary entry
- Fluent 2 2022– / Style
Tokenizes color, type, spacing, radius and depth, deploying Solid, Acrylic, Mica and Smoke materials by role across Microsoft products.
- Luna 2001–2006 / Style
Windows XP's look: blue taskbar, green Start button, rounded windows and a meadow wallpaper repainting the gray office machine as household optimism.
- Aero 2006–2012 / Style
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.
- Metro 2010–2015 / Style
Windows Phone's flat language, which cast type rather than icons in the lead role. Large typography, flat-color live tiles and layouts that run off the edge of the screen transplanted the clarity of transit signage into UI, opening the flat era ahead of iOS 7.
- Windows 95 Interface 1995–2001 / Style
The screen language Microsoft set down in its 1995 handbook for software design. Gray panels are carved with a doubled outer and inner edge, so the direction of the shadow alone says what can be pressed. A bar sits permanently along the bottom, and every application is assembled from the same system parts.
- Ribbon 2007– / Layout
A command bar that organises a program's features into a series of tabs at the top of a window, replacing both the menu bar and the toolbars. Microsoft introduced it with Office 2007 and named its parts in the Windows guidelines: core tabs, groups, contextual tabs, galleries, the Application button and the Quick Access Toolbar. Every command carries a label, and its size follows how often it is used.