Microsoft’s new logo is dull, dull, dull.
Things could have been very different…
Microsoft’s
new logo
Back on 23 August, Microsoft announced
something new. It wasn’t software, and it wasn’t hardware: it was a new
corporate logo, launched officially as it opened its new store in Boston,
Massachusetts. Technically it appeared in July on new keyboards and mice, but a
slight fudging of the unveiling isn’t the point. This redesign is the first one
for a quarter of a century. Sure, there have been Windows logo redesigns
aplenty, but the identity for Microsoft itself, not Windows, has been all but
sacrosanct since 1987.
The core visual identity was nailed down
back then, and through everything that’s happened since, good and bad – Windows
3, 95, NT, XP and Vista, assorted Office versions and assorted court cases,
Xbox, Zune and so on – the ‘Pac-Man’ identity, so called because of the cut in
the letter ‘c’, remained. However, it wasn’t always like this.
Before 1987 Microsoft had dabbled with a
couple of different designs, or three if you count something spotted in a 1982
issue of Creative Computing. The first logo was from 1975 and, boy, did it ever
look like it. The far-out concentric lines and splitting the name across two
lines were to be very short lived; the same year ushered in a new design as a
single word and with a funky ‘o’, nicknamed the ‘blibbet’. This lasted until
1987, a 12-year stretch. When the change was announced, there was some
resistance to losing the blibbet, but, whatever you think of the Microsoft’s
logo evolution, you’ll probably agree that the Pac-Man design was better than
what it replaced. (That third design in 1982? That was used in a classified ad
and it looks something like a retro cross between the Metallica and Anthrax
band logos. It probably got its creator a major rap over the knuckles for
ignoring corporate identity guidelines, but, yep, it was technically from
Microsoft.)
I’ve no idea what fonts were used for the
early designs, or even if they were from regular fonts or the product of a pen
and steady hand. The Pac-Man design from 1987 used a very tightly set Helvetica
Black Oblique. (I know most sources say Helvetica Bold, but it’s much heavier
than that.) The new font uses Segoe instead, the Frutiger-inspired font family
that’s been the standard face for the company’s advertising for the last few
years. It’s a clean, clear sans serif design that’s, well, a little boring.
Would you disagree? I mean, it’s competent and unfussy, serious but not
old-fashioned – a professional, safe implementation. It’s a well-designed
type-face, but dull in the way it’s used.
Along with the type, there’s a separate
graphic part of the logo, a symbol that’s clearly derived from the Windows
logos that have been morphing about since Windows 95. This is the first time
there’s been anything other than type as part of the Microsoft company logo,
discounting the funked-up parts of letters in the first couple of examples. Now
there are four squares in four colors, the famous red, yellow, blue and green
hues that say ‘Windows’ the world over. But, wait, what? This isn’t the Windows
logo, this is the Microsoft one. And guess what? There’s a new logo for Windows
8, and it’s dropped the four colors from its set of squares, using just a flat,
light blue color (which is sometimes translucent) in the new,
flattened-in-perspective windowpane graphic. It’s almost as if someone had sat
up, straightened their tie, and said, ‘Hey, you know what would be really
crazy…?’
The
“new” logo is simply a recycled version of the software company’s Windows ’95
logo
What’s curious about Microsoft logos, new
and old, is that there’s precious little information about who designed them.
The long-lived Pac-Man design was created by Scott Baker, but there’s not much
more detail than that. The new Windows identity was created by Paula Scher of
design heavyweights Pentagram, but, remember, that’s not the Microsoft
identity. I’m still not sure where the core Microsoft logo came from – or even
if it was developed inside or outside the company.
What I Am
sure about is that I’m not alone in being under-whelmed by this design. There’s
a lot of argument about this online, but Sagi Haviv (sagihaviv.com) said on
Mashable.com that it ‘simply isn’t distinctive enough’. He feels it’s too
generic and that it represents a big missed opportunity.
MinimallyMinimal.com’s Andrew Kim has gone
a big step further, not in criticism (although he’s not a fan of either the old
or the new look) but by putting his creative where his mouth was, even before
the new design was revealed. Earlier this year, he took three days out for a
personal experiment, and – purely as a personal project, totally unconnected
with Microsoft – created a new brand and message for the company (but,
remember, not actually for the company).
As part of this, he listed the ‘big three’
tech giants and what the public thinks of them, a good foundation for any
branding rethink. Microsoft was ‘outdated and slow, corporate, conservative’,
as well as being about gaming and Kinect. Apple was all about design and
engineering, and had a conflicting balance of ‘huge and controlling’ and
‘friendly and easy to use’. Sounds familiar! Google was ‘the search engine,
right?’ Also ‘don’t be evil’ and a cool place to work. From this, Kim decided that
‘Microsoft needs to be a brand that represents the future’, and doing that
would involve displaying itself as something slightly aggressive, promising to
deliver the future today, something ‘almost science fiction’.
His designs are a strong visual representation
of this thinking, and his sketches give a snapshot view of the process. The
rhomboid shape he calls the ‘slate’ (a name either Microsoft or Apple might
have chosen for their rival tablet computers, but neither did) was developed
from a window seen at an extreme angle. Curiously, it’s very similar to
Pentagram’s design root and subsequent development of the Windows 8 graphic,
although for me the ‘slate’ is rather more graphically interesting.
The logotype is a strong bit of type, with
the near-obligatory tweaks that change it from mere text to graphic. It’s more
tightly set than the new real logotype, and it definitely benefits from this.
The font is the same (taken from Microsoft’s pack-aging design standards), but
it feels much more powerful here because of the combination of three things:
the dot-free ‘i’, the tighter letterspacing, and the shape-unifying lowercase
‘m’. Interesting how small changes make a big impression, isn’t it?
Although Kim’s work was purely for personal
development, it got a lot of attention from creative and business quarters. He
blogged about the project on his MinimallyMinimal.com site, and you’ll probably
get straight to the post by searching in Google for ‘the next Microsoft’, which
is itself a good measure of the level of attention it’s had. As for Microsoft’s
real new identity, I’m sure it’ll last a long time – but what the company got
isn’t particularly exciting or forward-looking. To paraphrase the old saying
about IBM, nobody gets fired for buying safe. But I think the company needed
something better. Like Kim’s designs.
