What was the Windows 10 Aesthetic?

By Sofi Xian (2025.10.14)

Summary: With the end-of-life of Microsoft’s Windows 10, questions arise of what legacy it will leave behind. This article undertakes an archaeology of the system’s digital ruins and castaway symbols to examine its place in collective memory. It observes the complications of archiving a design approach that strives to be both universal and invisible. Finally, it considers how the ‘seamless, frictionless’ platforms may prove to be temporary with the rise of AI technology. This article is both a cursory look at the operating system as an ‘aesthetic object’ and an eulogy for it.

Today, Windows 10 is dead. Or this is to say that Microsoft is ending support for the operating system today, ten years after its release. In fact, Windows 10 has been undergoing a slow crawl towards death throughout the years: the end was announced back in 2021 roadmap. Since then, all of its services have become gutted. Starting in 2024, apps such as Maps, Paint 3D, and Windows Mail gradually disappeared. Even support for an integrated feature of the operating system, Timeline, which synced user activity history in the cloud, ended in January 2024. At the moment, the official Windows 10 themes page is still live, but there is no telling when it too will disappear. Already, a browse through the Microsoft Store (formerly Windows Store) shows the uncanny void Windows 10 is leaving behind. There is a gradually expanding accumulation of Windows 10 abandonware, neglected software released over a decade ago with few if any reviews.

Still, for some, this comes as a surprise: when Windows 10 was released in 2015, commentators speculated on the finality of the operating system. At Ignite 2015, Microsoft’s developer conference, developer Jerry Nixon declared this the last version of Windows. With the dominance of ‘flat design’ and Corporate Memphis, it seemed like this too was going to be the endpoint of interface design: frictionless, unintrusive, generic, poised to disappear into the background. But if there is anything we know about any ‘end of history’ (as Francis Fukuyama famously said in the 90s), it is that they never seem to be true. Windows 11 came out in 2021, just six years later, and is already the most-used version of Windows, if not necessarily the most warmly received. Windows 11 was a dramatic change, ushering a host of AI-related tools and with it, a new set of visuals.

The ‘end-of-life’ of an entire operating system is nothing new. In just the past ten years in Windows alone, we have seen this happen twice already: with Windows 7 (2020), then with Windows 8.1 (2023), and now with Windows 10. What is notable about these moments is not just how support for a piece of software ends, thereby causing an avalanche of other software to stop supporting it, but also how an entire system of symbols and meaning also disappears. In other words, the end of Windows 10 could be the end of a ‘Windows 10 aesthetic’. But what is even the Windows 10 aesthetic? What defines it, what is it part of, what are its neighbours and associates? If you ask yourself what is the Windows 10 era, what comes to mind? These are the sort of questions that those of us at Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute are concerned with. Although one would like to study an aesthetic as it is happening, it is often a post-mortem process, requiring the completion of a cycle and the distance of time to view the grander symbolic landscape. It can only be done as archaeology. It is also a slow process—it cannot be completed immediately or even anytime soon. However, it is one that we can begin now.

To address the elephant in the room: there is a temptation to create a Windows 10 analogue to the Frutiger Aero aesthetic that has become associated with the general tech-oriented design of the mid-2000s to early 2010s. Breaking down Frutiger Aero into its component parts of ‘Frutiger’ and ‘Aero’, such a hypothetical analogue would be ‘Frutiger Metro’ or ‘Frutiger Fluent’, but this would be erroneous. First, the typography (‘Frutiger’) is hardly significant enough to be representative of Windows 10 and its general aesthetic epoch; Microsoft largely retained its font selection (with Lucas De Groot’s Segoe from Vista simply being expanded), while Apple rebranded with the San Francisco family (also known as SF Pro) in 2014, a neo-grotesque font, and Google switched in 2015 to Product Sans, a geometric sans font. This means that the convergence of typography is no longer relevant.

Second, Microsoft itself internally organises its products into ‘design languages’. ‘Aero’ (which is referenced in Frutiger Aero) is one such design language, associated with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows 10, however, comes between two design languages, starting with the ‘flat design’ Metro it inherits from Windows 8 but switching to Fluent design in the Fall Creators Update in 2017.^[1] Although this should mean Windows 10 has been Fluent for most of its existence, it is actually more mixed, its ‘Fluency’ not realised to the extent it is in Windows 11. This means that it is virtually impossible to repurpose Microsoft’s design languages to categorise Windows 10 and that an aesthetic that encompasses Windows 10 in its entirety would have to confront the very difficult task of unifying both Metro and Fluent, two incredibly distinct approaches to UX design, under the same ideological base.

A journey through Windows 10

The contention of Frutiger Metro-Fluent aside, where can we look to find out what Windows 10 was? Let’s go for a journey together and see what we can find. One of the first places to look at the aesthetic language of any given Windows version is to look at the default desktop wallpaper. The default wallpaper creates the first impression, a sort of welcome sign for what you are stepping into, a summary. For example, Windows XP’s famous ‘Bliss’, a photo of rolling green hills and clouds in a blue sky^[2], creates the sense of freshness and open-endedness. Windows XP Media Center (2005) meanwhile updates this ‘Bliss’ with ‘Energy Bliss’, less of a focus on the grass, a much clearer sky with only two clouds and some subtle lens flare, a hint at the then emerging Frutiger Aero aesthetic. While ‘Energy Bliss’ is less rooted in reality than ‘Bliss’, Windows Vista takes abstraction a step further with its wallpaper titled ‘img24’, a computer rendering of auroras. Windows 10 however greets its users with a photograph of blue lasers shining through smoke and acrylic, an installation by Bradley Munkowitz (aka GMUNK). The laser lighting is a sort of precision present throughout the rest of the operating system: the sharp, flat edges of windows, the disappearance of the shadow on the cursor, the uniform light frame of Tiles in the start menu. Windows 10 is Tiles, like Windows 8, but with a light show.

The starkness of the space of the wallpaper brings a few things to mind for me. First, I am reminded of the way light emerges through a cross-shaped hole like in Church of the Light, a church in Japan designed by Tadao Ando. Second, I am reminded of the theatrics of electronic dance music laser projections. Both of these suggest that Windows 10, holds a sort of showy enlightenment, a sort of truth, one that separates it from the flat, minute intimacy of Windows 8 (whose default wallpaper was macro images of flowers and whose interface was dominated by dynamic flat tiles). Third, perhaps drawing from this, it serves as a reminder that Windows 10 is not just the flatness of the OLED monitor or tablet but also part of a virtual reality ecosystem, called Windows Mixed Reality.^[3]

Materials and industrial design

Although nothing in Windows 10 has a glass-like texture like in Munkowitz’s photo, the use of acrylic is consistent with the rest of Windows 10’s aesthetic-material lexicon. Acrylic, one of Fluent design’s materials, is very much the opposite of the sheen of glass from Frutiger Aero: a sort of frosted, semi-transparent matte texture with a hint of speckled noise. Acrylic is used in large spaces for contrast, namely the task bar and the sidebar of the settings window. This could mean part of the material palette of a hypothetical Windows 10 aesthetic could include matte materials.

Matte material is seen in other parts of design. Although operating systems contain their own abstract world, they have to run on something physical. This leads us to another possible area of examination: Windows 10 devices. Laptop screens, which tended to be glossy back when Frutiger Aero was dominant, seem to be largely matte. If you try to imagine the most generic Windows 10 device, what do you see? The body of many Windows 10 devices, often maligned for being clones of the MacBook, also have matte plastic, often large pieces snapped into each other, and with simulated metal (sometimes brushed, often not). The keys are flat island-style keys. Look at the HP EliteBook 840 or the Acer Swift 3, two models from 2018, two laptops that strike me as quintessentially of the era as any. They feel nondescript, a business-only, no-frills device for the remote worker.

        But Windows 10 is not only the OS of open offices and digital nomads in AirBnBs and co-working spaces: it is the first Windows OS to function also as a gaming OS. Although the gamer laptop emerged as early as the 2000s, it would not take hold until the 2010s where, as they developed a distinct industrial design language, computer stores began to stock gamer laptops in a separate ‘gaming’ section. Microsoft integrated Windows 10 into the Xbox ecosystem, including apps for gamers like the Xbox Game Bar, an integrated tool for screen recording. Chunky laptops with glowing keys and highlighted WASD keys, thin bezels, advertising a NVIDIA graphics card, laptops such as the Acer Predator 15 (2016) with red accents, also shape the aesthetic memory of Windows 10. A hypothetical Windows 10 aesthetic would also have to answer to the forms of such devices.

        Industrial design with laptops also contend with companies that have a strong design language of their own and resist change. For our analysis, this can be beneficial; these devices, such as the Lenovo Thinkpads or the Panasonic Let’s Notes, when compared as a line-up, can reveal how an aesthetic influence seeps in. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon (2016) retains much of the motifs of previous Thinkpads (look at the X220), but it somehow ‘feels’ like it is supposed to be a Windows 10 device, perhaps because of the flatness and matte sheen. Or consider the Panasonic Let’s Note CF-FV1 (2021), one of its last laptops to ship with Windows 10 but the first entry in its line-up to shift towards a thin body, a large touchpad, and small bezels. If all laptops that ship deliberately with Windows 10 contribute to what a Windows 10 aesthetic can be, these outliers show which qualities are the most vital to a Windows 10 device, that they cannot avoid adopting even when adhering to their own rigid design codes. They show a tendency to retreat, to strip down and recede, to not stand out.

        A look beyond laptops into peripherals from Microsoft can show us what Microsoft imagined as part of the aesthetic system for Windows 10. The HoloLens 2 (2019) and Surface Arc Mouse (2017) both are matte devices with smooth, rounded edges. They are largely unornamented, with features mostly focused on ergonomics. They appear in short to be strictly about experience. But what is notable is that neither of these objects are what one would immediately associate with Windows 10. Can you imagine a Windows 10 mouse? For me, I immediately think of a featureless grey wireless Logitech mouse. But these devices also compete with the gaming devices that dominated at the same time: the paradoxically stripped down maximalism of RGB backlit mechanical keyboards with a loud clickity-clack, the gaming mouse with a dozen trackballs, glowing LED cat-ear headphones.

Colours and illustrations

Of course, we cannot look at Windows 10 without looking at its customisation options. In the personalisation menu in the Fall Creators Edition, it offers 48 colours, roughly in light-dark pairs but ultimately medium in value (in lightness). Pastels, dark colours and completely neutral greys are noticeably absent. This reveals a sort of colour vocabulary of Windows 10 or its palette. This selection is an expansion from the original 15 that came with the original release. Both these selections, however, are distinctly different from the light colours, pastels and white colours of the Windows 8 palette. The Windows 7 palette has a mixture of pastels and dark rich hues, but they are applied to a glassy material.

        The colours here reveal an identity, a difference in affect. Detaching from its predecessors’ wispy colours, Windows 10 was not about eco-futurist dreams but about augmented reality. Rather, the colours all strike me as coming from fashion or from interior design, concurring with a mid-2010s resurgence of midcentury colours. The interesting thing about these ‘accent colours’ is the fact that they tend to be quite subtle in use. Unlike Windows Vista and 7’s Aero frames, where the colours are present on every window frame, in Windows 10, they are regulated to thin stripes in the taskbar, glimpses of loading apps. They are, strictly, accents. Sure enough, other desktops such as Linux Mint 18 Sarah’s Cinnamon environment combine an accent colour with neutrals with the intention of fluid transition between light and dark modes. Perhaps this is the intent behind the use of midtones: an adaptability that allows the operating system to become an unintrusive surface.

        The neutral + accent combination pops up also in some incidental illustrations in Windows 10. These illustrations are distinctly part of Windows 10’s visual ecosystem although they are also strangely disembodied from Windows 10. They are sparse to the point of being nearly unfindable. They only appear in brief, fleeting glimpses in modal dialogues or empty albums on first use. I only managed to find three examples: two tucked away in Photos Legacy, a legacy version of the Photos app that is no longer available and involves a convoluted installation procedure; the other in the OneDrive installation screen. Although they have some subtle gradients, they seem to belong to the same class of flatness retreating from view in Windows 11.

What is striking about these images is, although they are a stand-in for ‘people’, they are not avatars. Where Windows XP through Windows 8 all offered a selection of images to use as user icons, Windows 10 does not. Such a feature is completely absent from Windows 10. Instead, user icons are derived from profile pictures from their Microsoft account, which is the preferred way for users to log in. When such an image is unavailable (such as logging in with an offline account), the user is represented through a generic ‘user’ icon consisting of a white circle on top of a semicircle with a grey background. The implication is that, when everyone has a digital identity connected to a ‘real face’, there is no longer need for a set of archetypical icons. I am reminded of the phrase ‘Windows as a Service’, a phrase used by Microsoft when describing the endlessness of Windows 10 as a rolling release operating system. Here I think of ‘service’ in another way: an OS no longer intended to be its own experience but a seamless portal to web-based tools.

Emojis and Ninjacat

Windows 10 also marks the introduction of colour emojis. First, they appear without outlines and then, with the Anniversary Update in 2016, they gain thick outlines, designed to allow the emojis to stand out. Before this, Windows only had monochrome emojis and afterwards in Windows 11, we see Fluent Emojis, with soft gradients and a 3D-rendered clay-like texture. The colourful but flat, thick-outlined emojis can become part of Windows 10’s aesthetic vocabulary, but with a caveat: emojis are such a dramatic rupture from text that they seem to demand their own visual language. The font used, Segoe UI Emoji, although still restrained, seems to be a compromise to the rest of the OS’s style. It is not so surprising, then, that in a time when phone apps are filled with ‘playful’ emojis in their transient notifications, Windows 10 is restrained.

Of course, we cannot remember Windows 10 emojis without remembering the Ninjacat: In a classic case of ‘embrace and extend’, Microsoft included six new, and exclusive emoji combinations. The emojis, embedded in the same Segoe UI Emoji font, feature a cat with a ninja headband performing different actions: flying like Superman, hacking on a Microsoft Surface, slaying a dragon, drinking coffee, and wearing a helmet in space. If emojis are rupture, then Ninjacat is a rupture on top of a rupture. It can be contrasted with Apple’s Clarus, the ‘dogcow’ mascot that originated from Apple’s early corporate culture. But what is notable about Ninjacat is how much it appears foreign to Windows 10 itself. A scruffy cat with a headband seems more in line with the then-current commodification of Internet culture (what we call Internet Awesomesauce). Some images of Ninjacat riding a T.Rex and a unicorn, both ‘awesomesauce’ staples, circulated among early Microsoft insider circles in early Windows 10. Microsoft also released a series of Ninjacat themes on their app store, in different colourful flat and ironically sublime situations.

I think of these mascots that momentarily emerge but hide in the background, like Kokopelli in the Global Village Coffeehouse consumer aesthetic or Microsoft Word’s paperclip mascot Clippit, as ambient symbols. They linger in the faint memories of an aesthetic until they slowly seep forth in the general ecosystem of symbols as representatives of an aesthetic, a way of experiencing and interpreting the world. With Ninjacat’s hasty disappearance with Fluent Design emojis, it of course falls into the legacy of Windows 10. But can it become some destined to become an ambient symbol of Windows 10 in our collective latent memory? Even bounded by the operating system’s lifespan, Ninjacat does not seem to live in the realm of Windows 10. It seems like a visitor, an alien from somewhere else.

Themes

But speaking of themes, we cannot forget the importance of default themes. If the default wallpaper gives the first impression, default themes hint at the boundaries of what is possible. They allude to the grammar of a system of meaning that defines an aesthetic. Windows 7 came with seven themes, but there are only five in Windows 10, including a ‘Windows spotlight’ theme of daily rotating images.^[4] However, this lack is supplemented by the official Microsoft site which lists over 300 ‘community’ themes (mainly collections of wallpapers) below a warning of the encroaching retirement of the page. These themes are presented without previews and include movie franchises such as Harry Potter and Puss in Boots, regional photographs, and branded themes. I have only gotten a chance to look through a few of them—they do not have a sort of cohesive aesthetic rigour that Windows 7 themes have and feel loose and unofficial, some even sporting very glaring watermarks from the contributor.

On the Microsoft Store, there is a different selection provided by Microsoft itself. If we extend the idea of ‘default themes’ to include these themes, we expand the sense of what Windows 10 is supposed to ‘feel’ like. The themes section is filled with all sorts of wallpaper packs, some marked ‘PREMIUM’, dating 2018-2019. They encompass a dizzying array of themes: Seasons, Architecture, Floral, Naturescapes, Cats, Dogs; aside from the ‘Abstract Art’ section and Ninjacats, they are almost entirely photographs. This curation hints at what kind of place Windows 10 may have imagined in the world: both a mere surface to disappear into the physical and photographic world and a participatory space for user contribution.

Experiences and participation

All the visuals aside, what can we remember about Windows 10 as an experience? While in the late 2000s there were many attempts to bring the ‘look and feel’ of Windows Vista to XP for those who could not upgrade, many Windows 10 users attempt to ‘tame’ their operating system and transform it into something more familiar.^[5] But doing so, we suppress the natural logic and flow of Windows 10. What is Windows 10 if it is vanilla, unrestricted, unmodified? The first thing that comes to mind is the Task View feature. It is in particular uniquely Windows 10 and its ability to sync across all devices once shows one of the promises of Windows 10: the unity of all devices. This unification is replicated not only in OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) but also in the Windows Store itself, which is a crucial part of Windows 10’s app-dominated experience. Although this is a carryover from Windows 8 with its Metro apps and the Windows Store (now called the Microsoft Store) has, if anything, become more central in the application ecosystem of Microsoft, these sorts of made-for-all-devices apps are still being eroded by Microsoft’s new focus on Co-Pilot in Windows 11. Defunct apps like Paint 3D or Mixed Reality Portal, a frontend for Windows Mixed Reality, are crucial to the Windows 10 experience that have become shells of promises and visions unrealised.

Moreover, the sensation of ‘unity’ is one that, as Windows 10’s services terminate, dissipates. A key factor in the development of Windows 10 was large-scale customer feedback, done through the Windows Insider Program launched in 2014. Perhaps it is striking that I have not evaluated icons, often one of the first parts of an operating system that is considered, alongside the wallpaper. In fact, icons had undergone a number of transformations in Windows 10, first through a series of customer feedback rounds and then revamped with the new Fluent design language in 2018. Icons were apparently part of the feedback given through a platform run by Vision Critical (now Alida) called The Feedback Lab.^[6] It has since all but disappeared without a trace, another vaporous platform left by Windows 10. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke of ghosts, the remainders of lost futures in cultural memory. With these participatory and democratic spaces hollowed out, I suspect this is only one of the many ghosts Windows 10 will leave behind, which will become more apparent with time.

If Windows 10 seems from this cursory description to be a mishmash of different styles in the 2010s, perhaps this is because it is. Many of its motifs—the laser wallpaper, the gaming orientation, the single-colour accents against black and metal—are actually part of the Hexatron aesthetic, while others—such as the flat illustrations of diverse avatars and the tastefully mediated colour selections and minimalist industrial designs—are Corporate Memphis and Neoliberal Vector Minimalism. Its most notable if evanescent mascot, Ninjacat, seems to be more Internet Awesomesauce invading the operating system than an inherent part of it. If anything, Windows 10 demonstrates that, at the time of its release, operating systems ceased to be the dominant carrier of a consumer aesthetic. Starting from the 90s when hardware limited aesthetic expression, resulting in platform-specific restrained designs, to the frenzied wave of Windows Vista and other Frutiger Aero desktops (KDE4, Compiz Fusion, Mac OS Leopard, etc.), consumer aesthetics now seemed to be everywhere but on the desktop operating system. In order to hide interfaces seamlessly into the background, aesthetics disappeared literally into the cloud: in rapidly updating apps on mobile devices, into websites for startups and their products. This however is no longer the case with AI-focused operating systems with new aesthetic paradigms like in Windows 11 and iOS 26. Perhaps this is also timing: when Windows 11 came out in 2021, users had already stared for hours at the ‘real world’ photographic wallpapers of Windows 10, becoming in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns more like false windows into a forbidden outside world. Whatever Windows 10 was, it had already overstayed its welcome by then.

Requiem for a mixed reality

With any aesthetic, there is also the chance of someone missing it as soon as it goes away. As humans we are creatures that find comfort in the familiar while mourning what we have missed out on. For its users, its ten years of existence will be inextricable from the cultural memory of 2015 to 2025. The youth that is now growing up around Italian Brainrot and Labubu toys, surrounded by the subliminal dominance of green (of Dubai chocolate, of matcha, of Charlie XCX’s Brat), the deluge of newborn popular AI technology, will feel they have just escaped Windows 10. In parts of the world where Microsoft is most swift with its purging of the Windows 10 order, Windows 10 will become an ambient, embedded memory, a lost, elapsed moment. Its glimpses will emerge in malfunctioning public devices that have not been updated. Moreover, it will become a reminder of a bygone time where computers gave a semblance of communication with other humans rather than infinite scrolls, slop and chatbots. For all the griping about the soullessness of flat design, Windows 10—and Corporate Memphis and Hexatron and Internet Awesomesauce and whatever other as-yet uncategorised aesthetic it may be contextualised as—will be seen as the halcyon days before computers were given not a soul but an unwanted ‘intelligence’. What if we kept demanding somethingness and realised we preferred nothingness?

I myself wanted to spend the last few days of Windows 10’s life to witness and observe it as an aesthetic experience, not out of my own feelings towards it, but to understand what sort of intentions lay behind its trail, in its vanishing order. The deserted reviews sections of forgotten Metro apps, the forgotten themes with a notice of Windows 10’s impending discontinuation, they all inspire a pathos, a reminder of impermanence. With these digital ruins, Windows 10 asks a crucial question about what it means to document, archive and interpret an entire generation of software and cultural products that are, more so than before, intangible and disposable. It is not surprising that in 2013, not long before Windows 10, the Internet Archive declared the moment to be one of the Digital Dark Age. What is fascinating is how quickly Microsoft is able to bury Windows 10, whose aesthetic cues were already primarily background, designed to be hidden, most of its content elsewhere in the web. The plug pulled, the displacement is immediately clear, like the eerie silence that follows a power outage. An unsupported Windows 10 becomes a hollow shell. An operating system, after all, is the cumulative effort of hundreds if not thousands of people: of programmers, designers, artists, engineers, volunteer users. Software and aesthetics, with no physical trace, are the ones first to be absorbed by the aether, doubly so when its goal from the beginning was to disappear. Rapid obsolescence obscures the past. To build an operating system is to throw your paintings into a stream.

Goodbye Windows 10, goodbye Metro apps, goodbye Ninjacat. Not every show is a rave, but there is a tristesse in every conclusion. From now on, we will see Liquid Glass, computer-generated clayform images with soft gradients, abstract wallpapers that blend the shapes of flowers and brain folds. The time of Windows 10, the most invisible Windows version, is for now, over. Will the last one to leave please turn off the lasers?