Microsoft Redesigns Office App Icons

NewsEditorial • December 05, 2018 • 2 minutes READ

Changes in the digital world are happening rapidly and every industry is affected. That is why great companies keep up with trends, so they don’t become part of the past.

Microsoft revealed new, modern Office App Icons. But did they preserve the authenticity of the globally known brand?

Office Icons – What’s New?

Trends require new ways of doing things, especially when it comes to brand image.

The history of Office includes designers that have been cautious with change, and they took care with this redesign. The goal was to keep icons recognizable to over a billion users across the globe while adding lighter and bolder colors. These changes to the Office icons are the first in 5 years since Microsoft updated productivity suite logos.

Apps that represent the new branding are Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, OneNote, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and Skype.

We now have bolder colors, combined with a different structure of the icon itself. Icons consist of two panels – one with the letter and the other is sort of a background that provides depth and 3D context.

Two things Microsoft accomplished with the redesign

If we look closer, these icons are speaking a modern language, but they have kept something that is truly important for every brand with tradition: familiarity. If you combine it with simplicity, then you can be sure you won’t scare loyal users.

Microsoft has implemented both into new Office icons, which is moving in the right direction.

Office is no longer just a line of apps that you download and use on your PC; today it is a cloud-based subscription service that works on numerous platforms. That’s why this redesign is a natural part of the evolution of Office apps.