Microsoft is going to change app icons for their Office suite. A new post on Microsoft Design on Medium reveals some new icons, which will be the first update of icons in five years.
The last time the company updated the Microsoft Office icons was in 2013, "when selfies were new enough to become Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year and emojis were new enough to be considered buzzworthy", the official announcement says.
The new icons for Microsoft Office have been designed to giving them a "bolder, lighter and friendlier" look but keep the familiar style.
Microsoft has shared some details on how the new icons were invented:
We wanted a visual language that emotionally resonates across generations, works across platforms and devices, and echoes the kinetic nature of productivity today.
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.
The new icons shift the focus from the document outline to the content produced by each app. The blue lines in the icon of Microsoft Word represent a document. The green boxes in the Excel icon are cells of a sheet. The folder style of the previous icons is no logner used.
See the following video:
Microsoft will release the new Office icons starting with Office 365, web and mobile apps in the near future.
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Thanks Sergey! 2013 ones look more meaningful.
Very nice icons and original. Hoping the Modern Apps also get a facelift in icons because plain white is very boring. Seeing the images of Microsoft, they showed new icons for Calculator, Photos, Explorer, Calendar, News and Mail(different from Outlook)
They look nice, but I don’t care about them as much. What I do want to see is new Windows Icons without square backgrounds, as shown in this video. Hope they’ll come to Windows soon, I’m tired of ugly inconsistent icons in Windows.
0:42 – New System Icons? WOW!
This confirms that Access and Publisher are in maintenance mode and may be probably be dropped after Office 2019. Also, Project is going cloud-only with a complete rewrite of APIs and features, with Project 2019 probably being the last “legacy” release.
Why is Microsoft wasting time and money developing new Icons? Maybe they should look to reducing the cost to users of the whole Office suite. I am considering switching of LibreOffice once I have completed a review of the Database app if it will do what Access does.
I uploaded all the Office 2019 icons here to DropBox if anyone wants them: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7woaln21w9kywhw/Office%202019%20Icons.zip?dl=0 (Or you can post them in a new article Mr. Sergey).
Thanks a ton!
They look like a cartoon. Why change from office 2010? They are the best there was not a cartoon character.