Icons of Microsoft Office for Windows 10 have been the same since 2013, however, this is about to change as Microsoft recently announced a new icon design for Office 365.
The head of Office design at Microsoft, Jon Friedman announcing in his blog post about the major icon redesign. “It is a huge undertaking to build a common system and design 10 icons at the same time. Now that we have established the system we will start to scale it across all of Microsoft.”
As described by Friedman, the colors have been changed to be ‘bolder, lighter, and friendlier’, and portray connections within each app’s symbol and the collective suite. The letter and the symbol in the icons have been separated, creating two panels: one for letter and one for the symbol. This also gives depth and 3D-look to the icons.
The new icons also removed the tool formatting. For instance, the earlier MS Word and MS Excel icons contained a document outline and spreadsheet outline respectively, but in the new icons, there are lines of text for Word and individual cells for Excel. Through this, the team has tried to focus on the content instead of the specific format.
The letter-to-symbol ratio has also been changed. The letter that earlier occupied two-thirds of the icon and the symbol had one-third, it has now been changed to emphasize more on the symbol since it speaks more and the letter represent the tool itself.
Moreover, Friedman said that the refurbished icons will roll out across various platforms in upcoming months, starting with mobile and web. “They are the result of many iterations, a lot of research and testing, and plenty of late nights and weekends.”