Designing an app frame that has to stay as unnoticed as possible.
As a photographer, to be in the right place is of crucial importance. John Stanmeyer was wandering about on the streets of Djibouti City, the capital of the small african state when, being bored, he decided to go to the beach near the town. After 20 minutes there, right after sunset, he observed a group of people walking on the sand with their phones in the air. He took pictures of them and found out they were Somalis who came to this place at the country’s border to get GSM signal with their Somali SIM cards to speak cheaply with their relatives they left behind when emigrated. One of these photos won him the greatest prize a photo-journalist could dream of, the World Press Photo award.
Being in the right place was what the organizers of this international contest tried to accomplish by developing a native Windows app. Let aside the numbers of people on the platform. We’ve been told by Sorin Bechira, the creative who coordinated the project very closely, that the new Bauhaus inspired design language of Microsoft it’s best for putting the content in spotlight.
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“Form has to follow function and content has to stand out. This Metro style it’s exactly what you need to highlight the content. “, said in a brief discussion with Das Cloud Sorin Bechira, creative director of design studio X3. With this ocassion we found out that even if Microsoft changed the name of its design language from Metro to Modern, the designers stick to the first one.
Sorin Bechira says that an app designer seeks not to make a “face” for each platform out there but to integrate the app’s design into each device. Being so straightforward and simple, Metro UI is not standing against the app, there are only minor adjustments to be made to have the same visual experience.
And if there’s a controversy regarding a conflict of interest for the World Press Photo jury, looks like it’s much more simple in terms of choosing the most design friendly app platform: the newest tends to have the upper hand.