Microsoft.com New Design Preview

I decided to download Movie Maker so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a Downloads menu there. I clicked "All Windows Downloads". (The site is pretty fast, BTW). I selected "Windows 7", then scrolled down until I found Movie Maker. I clicked "Get it now" and it showed me the Movie Maker page. On that page I clicked Download Now, and it started downloading!

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

Really nice support of different browser sizes. Resize your browser from wide to really narrow to check it out.

That is an impressive adaptive site design update.<p>A couple of things I love about this is (1) the elegance of the menu toggle to top in the small (mobile-size) view and (2) the slideshow control appearance on small view and adaptation to breadcrumb implementation on large view. Quite elegant and appropriate for each environment.<p>Of course, it is sad that the experience is rarely consistent when you start digging deeper into the site.

We've all known it for a while, but this redesign (which I think is quite nice compared to Microsoft's previous efforts) throws their logo into stark relief. It looks outdated. It doesn't match.<p>I'm speculating that we'll see an across-the-board Microsoft rebrand within the next two years, including a new logo for the company. They've rebranded their core software offering, they're now changing directions on their hardware/software philosophy, and trying to gain some mindshare for their new aesthetic (and their new appreciation for aesthetics more generally) is going to be a core part of that movement.<p>Thoughts?

I don't know, I just think you can take sparse so far it becomes soulless. Simple, clean design can still be emotive. This isn't. The stock art humans make this feel more like a Big Oil annual report. (And that Products menu is a little painful!) All that said, this is leaps and bounds beyond their current homepage.

Shouldn't the menu be all capitalized?

I really don't like the use of big photos like here, the new airbnb, and Bing. They are busy, space wasting and bandwidth hogs. And to my eyes they don't add anything.

Very modern, very metro, beautiful design.<p>I like it.

That's a totally odd font choice they are using. Check out the "d", the "b" and the "p" - looks horrible in Firefox 13! [1]<p>Oh, and it looks terrible in Internet Explorer 8, as the layout is completely out of whack. [2]<p>1. <a href="http://static.inky.ws/image/2290/image.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://static.inky.ws/image/2290/image.jpg</a><p>2. <a href="http://static.inky.ws/image/2291/image.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://static.inky.ws/image/2291/image.jpg</a>

I am completely underwhelmed beyond the responsiveness, which is nice. Feels very yesterday. One click thru to products page, and it's more underwhelming. Shows lack of vision for the company. "Managing home and homework just got easier." Really? This is the best their designers and copywriters can show us?

Broken in IE8 on Vista SP1 (divs are placing one after the other horizontally instead of in their proper places).

Beautiful and much better. A little cold and sterile from all the white space but it's a step in the right direction. They'll iron things out over time.<p>ONE thing. Where are the Previous &#38; Next Arrows for the main slideshow?

Is this what we have to look forward to with Metro?<p>The design seems like a children's book combined with some ISP "landing page" from 1995. Everything is big and bold, yet the entire page is almost completely devoid of meaningful content. It's just a vast array of disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole bunch of vast arrays of disorganised links, with no sign of any rational information architecture or even basic scannability.<p>Sorry, but I just can't find anything nice to say about it. It has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever AFAICS.

Looks like they're matching one of their main web properties' UI with their new OS IU.<p>In some ways that makes sense, they're going all out or bust, in other ways I'm not sure that searching thru Technet articles will be best experienced via this new UI --granted their previous IF to Technet was horrible.<p>Something else is that previously they had no uniform design. different teams had different designs for their domains. Once you entered a search term, all bets were off on what the page you got to would look like.

I think one thing conspicuously lacking here (besides rounded borders and gradiented buttons, both of which aren't part of Metro style) is icons. Nowadays most sites use icons to add visual interest to plain text. Microsoft's old designs didn't, and I think they suffered for the lack of them. The new design is refreshing and clean but would still benefit from having some similarly clean and functional graphical elements, i.e. icons.<p>(Crossposting to their feedback.)

The simplicity of the metro design style is a great direction. It's in a way a forced simplicity which can minimize the UI clutter we have come to know from Microsoft. But reducing elements means that the few that you have should be as refined as possible, and proportion, scale and white space become more important. I think this site would look 10 times better and balanced with better sizing and spacing of everything.

I don't see anything special about this new design. It's sparser than before, but I don't see anything "too Metro" about it. Just 3-4 images and text links. Is that supposed to mean it's Metro? Because there are a lot of similar sites like that on the web. Would Craiglist with bigger fonts, more space between links and 3 big images at the top become "Metro"?

So why didn't their Surface launch site look like that?? And will they be fixing search (other than including Google GSE which would be a vast improvement).<p>Edited to add: the answer to my last question is 'no': <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=surface" rel="nofollow">http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=surface</a>

Good to see that the use the "menu with down-arrows" correctly, that is "on click", rather than flickery on hover.

Here's one angle..MS has 2 large very different customer sets, the enterprise and the consumer and in the past it seemed that a lot of the UI was some sort of a compromise targeted to both.<p>The consumer tech group is definitely getting stronger at design .. and the enterprise tech arm can rely on its salesforce

I'm not particularly anti-Microsoft, but I absolutely <i>hate</i> this design. The text is so huge I find it painful to read, most of the page is taken up by a slideshow of what seem to be generic stock images, and I have to scroll before I can find anything useful.

It's like a beautiful store front.<p>Click on almost any link and the beautiful geometric layout is replaced with something different and far less pleasant.<p>This would have made so much more impact on me if the theme had been deployed more consistently and thoroughly across more pages.

That's the squarest site ever! I take it IE <i>still</i> doesn't support rounded corners?

It's pretty nice, works well across desktop to mobile (the slide-down menus are a bit slow on mobile). My only issue is that I don't particularly care for the Sans-serif font on the section headers. It just doesn't look "right" to me.

Looks neat, uncluttered and peppy! But what about the favicon? That is so 1990!

Not a very efficient solution to the "Google is getting too much attention" problem. I have to respect the people who did it, even if I don't the manager who decided to show it before it's ready.

Wondering if Blitz Agency designed this, they're known for doing design/web work for Microsoft.<p><a href="http://www.blitzagency.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.blitzagency.com/</a>

Nice look, but, slow as hell to load. 15 seconds before anything appeared. Maybe because I'm in Australia. (my net connection is around 5mbit so its not that).

Really cool responsive design, works and resizes smoothly both on FF and Chrome, while I've seen some similar implementations being very slow on Chrome.

Wonder if they're planning to make ALL their web content responsive. A lot of work for their web devs!

God, finally a MS website that I can actually determine something about what the company does from.

Is it just me or does the guy in the last slide look like hes using a photoshopped macbook air/pro?

I like it but something about it (well, the entire metro design) feels... off. This is the sort of <i>style</i> I really enjoy so I maybe it might just be the feeling that's too forward for a company like Microsoft, but something about it that I can't put my finger on makes me second guess how much I like it.

There is no auto-complete in the search box. Should this not be expected?

Congrats to the MS web team. Great job. Makes me want a job there. :)

Uses jQuery and Modernizr libraries. Nice work Microsoft.

What is bi:index used for?

is there anybody who really likes these slide shows on the home page?

It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they <i>still</i> after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been forced to use Windows at my new job. I wasn't happy about it but it turns out I've gotten just about as productive with it as any other platform. But the problem is that now, 4 weeks in, I get terrible eye strain and the whole system looks ugly because fonts are jagged except at really large sizes. It's ironic that this new site looks awesome on my iPad and Mac but not so much on their own OS, Windows. Why can't they fix that already?

Blinded by the white. Inconsistency of design between child sites.

HTML5

Weird, I can't see anything if Adblock is on. Make sure yours is whitelisting microsoft.com (at least temporarily).

It's taken a long while, but Michaelsoft are finally getting their shit together. Well Done!