Microsoft's Designers Are Now Working Together on the Future of Windows, Office and Surface (theverge.com)

Microsoft has changed the way it approaches design. The new Office icons unveiled this week are the first glimpse at a far bigger design overhaul that's going on inside the company. Windows is also getting its own icon changes, but the bigger change is a collaborative effort going on between the Windows, Office, and Surface teams. From a report: "This is definitely a cross company effort," explains Jon Friedman, Microsoft's head of Office design, in an interview with The Verge. The company's design leaders -- Friedman with Office, Albert Shum on the Windows side, and Ralf Groene for Surface -- all work together now. "We operate like an internal open source team," Friedman says.

"So we're all openly sharing our design work, critiquing the work, working on it together. What we've found is that the best way to develop our Fluent Design system is to truly open source it internally. What's happened is that we're getting the best of everyone's work that way."

Comments

Here are the Fluent guidelines

[SuperKendall]

I had missed the whole new "Fluent" design thing from Build (I normally try to pay attention to what they talk about but was too busy this year).

So I dug down a bit and finally found the Fluent design guidelines. There are some interesting things going on there, like use of light and focus in different ways depending on screen distance (viewing something on a TV screen vs. on a screen right in front of you), probably worth going over to incorporate good ideas into your own UI work...