Microsoft just announced their new Office icons as part of a larger design overhaul

Microsoft Office Icons redesigned

The last time that Microsoft updated their Office logos was in 2013, when probably most people haven’t any idea what selfie was. A lot has changed since then and of course it changed the way how users interact with Office apps. Nowadays, more than 1 billion people from different industries, geographies and generations use Office almost every day, from different platforms and devices. What led the Microsoft team to dedicate more time to the redesign of their Office icons.   

According to their head of design for Office, Jon Friedman, the redesign is part of a push to implement its Fluent Design language and create unique and instantly recognisable icons for Office across all platforms.  "From the get-go, we embraced Office’s rich history and used it to inform design decisions. Strong colours have always been at the core of the Office brand, and new icons are a chance to evolve our palette. Color differentiates apps and creates personality, and for the new icons we chose hues that are bolder, lighter and friendlier”, said Jon.

The New Icons Explained

In a world of constant transition, the new icons support and show that Office is now a collaborative suite that let the user work together in real-time from everywhere and almost any device. They are modern and fun and demonstrate the powerful AI features built in Office, such as, insights from data with less effort, you can write a paper using your own voice, integrate your resume Word file with ideas from LinkedIn, and more.

Besides that, great design is always pleasant and make the users experience fluid and seamless. The idea behind the changes was motivated by a human-centred design with emphasis on content and reflecting the speed of our modern life.

In the image below, you can see the evolution of the icons and how the last and new change give it a much more modern and integrated appearance. To achieve that they removed the traditional toll formatting, which was a visual boundary. For example, prior Office icons had a document outline for Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet outline for Excel, now it shows lines of text for the Word icon and individual cells for the Excel, focusing on the content instead of any specific format.

In the next months you will see more focus on design in Microsoft products and probably will start to get used to the new icons in your daily activities.

*The article above is based on the information provided by this website.

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