Friday, November 30, 2018

Redesigning the Office App Icons

Jon Friedman:

As a signal to our customers, we’ve evolved our Office icons to reflect these significant product changes. We’re thrilled to share the new icons for Office 365 with you today and tell the story behind their creation.

[…]

Our design solution was to decouple the letter and the symbol in the icons, essentially creating two panels (one for the letter and one for the symbol) that we can pair or separate. This allows us to maintain familiarity while still emphasizing simplicity inside the app.

Separating these into two panels also adds depth, which sparks opportunities in 3D contexts. Through this flexible system, we keep tradition alive while gently pushing the envelope.

Previously: Redesigning Adobe’s File Type Icon System Language.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter


The schadenfreude of watching these companies slooooowly walk back the idiotic decisions of flat UI has almost made this lost decade of design worth it.


I'm sad to see they didn't take the opportunity to revert Outlook to its traditional yellow. I use the Office suite daily at work and not being able to at a glance tell Outlook from Word in the application switcher on Windows is intensely frustrating.


[…] Michael Tsai, Microsoft has redesigned their Office icons and will be rolling them out gradually to 365 […]

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