Metro

Also called Modern UI, Microsoft design language

Microsoft's typographic interface language: flat coloured tiles, no ornament, and type doing the work that chrome used to do.

Metro: a Windows Phone start screen on a true black ground, a left-aligned grid of flat lime tiles at the three sizes Microsoft published, small, medium and wide carrying counts and names rather than icons, two of them showing a mark on a carrier, and the arrow to the app list in the empty right column. — Metro, a Drew Ink start screen, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-10.

Metro at rest: a Windows Phone settings list caught mid tile-flip, white type on true black with the accent sweeping across it. — Windows Phone 8.1 settings, mid transition, Armin2208.
Public domain
Public domain: Tagged PD-ineligible on Commons: the uploader's own screenshot of a settings list, held to be below the threshold of originality. For white type on flat colour that is the argument the tag exists for, and it is the reason this one can be printed where a Material screen could not. The interface is Microsoft's; the screenshot is the uploader's.
Retrieved 2026-09-10.

The anatomy of the start screen: the four-column grid ruled over the drawing in vermilion, the small, medium and wide tiles boxed where each one sits, and a panel naming the frame, the tile sizes, the gutter and the margin beside the colours counted off the file. — Metro, the anatomy, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-10.

Near it

Flat design

Swiss typography

Fluent Design

What it is made of

type	Segoe, set large, as the primary structure
tiles	flat, full-bleed colour, no border
motion	content sliding in and out of frame rather than fading

Where it came from

Windows Phone 7 in 2010, taking its cues from transit signage, which is where the name came from. Microsoft stopped using the name Metro in 2012 and the language continued under other names.