Member-only story
The rebirth of Office
Evolving the Office brand for a new world of collaboration
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn on March 23, 2020.
When I first began my design career in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where my early work was founded in branding, the idea of working with such a well-established and recognizable brand such as Microsoft’s seemed like a far-fetched dream. Fast forward two decades and I find myself right in the midst of an exciting transformation here at Office, where both the experience and its brand are evolving into an exciting new direction.
Some of the most obvious catalysts for this evolution were both the simplification of our core experiences and later, the redesign of our experience icons, both of which contributed significantly to the overall aesthetic and functionality of the new and modern Office.
Last December, we revealed yet another set of icon designs, including one for Office itself. The timing of this brand evolution was in sync with the reveal of the brand-new Office mobile app, which combines Word, Excel and PowerPoint with uniquely mobile ways that make document creation easier.
As we began the redesign process for the Office icon, we were eager to simply crack open Adobe Illustrator and begin generating ideas. Although we did some of that, we also discovered that the challenges of revisiting such a widely known icon were actually much larger than we had expected. After all, for many, it represented a beloved and familiar set of creation tools that had been around since the 1980's.
With many variations of the icon pinned across our design studio and research results starting to fill our inboxes, we began to collectively gravitate towards the familiar threshold shape that our customers were already accustomed to. We added depth, a richer color palette and softer, friendlier…
