Simon? Pfft
I think you'll find Chrome is the real Simon rip off http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkvision/2822604151/
Microsoft has redrawn its corporate logo for the first time since the 1980s in a move likely to have the web boiling over its significance. Out is the fluttering Windows flag with Microsoft spelled using a bold black typeface and the "o" slashed by the "s". In is a four-piece square that looks like a Simon memory game, with " …
In many respects, I'm a fan of the return to the "flat", clean look of graphic design, where it's done well. For example:-
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="saul+bass"+logos&tbm=isch
The Warner Communications logo? Great design:-
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Y2F7daFbH4M/SoSV6XxfNQI/AAAAAAAAB7w/Bcyt7NIldos/s400/warner+communications+original+logo.jpg
The original Atari logo is one of my all-time favourites:-
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vQwcCefjC_U/T7jUw8jn6JI/AAAAAAAA6Nk/wHXOmXbR_VQ/s320/Atari-Logo-Photos.jpg
However, the downside of this becoming a trend is that it's harder than it looks to come up with a logo that looks great when shorn of pretty shading effects and the like. In going for that back-to-basics look, it's all too easy for a less-skilled designer to end up with something that simply looks underdesigned, boring and/or amateur.
(FWIW, this goes for the "flat" design trend in general, and not just logos.)
For example, the new Office 2013 logo in white against red is (IMHO) quite effective. On the other hand, the new Microsoft logo seen in the video (with its four coloured squares) looks underdesigned and dull. Meanwhile, while I like the white and cyan minimalist colours, the Windows 8 logo itself is boring *and* bordering on amateurish, due to the perspective chosen rendering the cross with (too coincidentally perfect and naff-looking) 90 degree angles. I still can't believe they accepted something that bad. Saul Bass it ain't.
I actually thought the current Windows Phone logo- with its flattened and boxed version of the XP "wavy" Window- was much more effective:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WindowsPhone7logo.svg
The logo change is a Sure sign of the deep infection of marketing droiditis in MS when, as well as a criminally ugly new user interface (that used to be called Metro), they've also done through a "corporate rebranding". We just need some whale song and some anally retentive justifications (excuses) for the new nuances that the rebranding inflicts in customers. Doesn't matter if it's fugly, usable or anything, as long as the marketing droids like it.
Some marketing or design company/department has probably been paid millions to re-brand this logo and came up with a 4 boxes. I bet they spent hours explaining the evolving dynamics of such a logo.
The people who come up with this crap should be shot, along with the managers that buy into it.
P.S: Can you say someone should be without the met police knocking on your door these days? Or is that just twitter?
Or, is it that you've never worked in typography and don't understand just how much effort and design work goes into a logo change for a multinational company.
Hint: There will have been many more than one logo proposed and Microsoft have their logo on just a tad more than their headed paper. Some of the signs on buildings alone will cost tens of thousands of pounds.
20 years ago BT paid 5 million for the trumpet player design. 5 million for a logo is excessive for a doodle by anyone's standards. In the end with all the reprinting etc it cost them 50 million and then they had tons of redundancies shortly after......
Not likely to happen with microsoft but the costs involved for a simple design are criminal. These charges get passed on to customers eventually.
Wrote :- "you've never worked in typography and don't understand just how much effort and design work goes into a logo change"
We understand full well how much money this sort of crap costs, but thanks for reminding us. The point being made by many here however is just what a waste of money it is. As you say there are two costs - one is to pay the "Design Company" to come up with this, a paper excercise accompanied by bullshit managerial presentations on its "meaning" - a meaning that will be totally lost on most people.
The other cost is the physical change to signage, vehicle liveries, and the dumping of literally tons of headed paper with the old logo, at a time when we are meant to be saving things to save the planet.
I have been in companies which have wasted millions on this frippery. In one they adopted a logo consisting of its initials, a red and a white letter, on a blue ground. We soon discovered that when photocopied on a B&W copier, the red initial dissappeared against the blue ground, leaving only the white one. What a cock-up, yet we paid a designer a 5 figure fee for it. An art student could have done better in a school project.
Yeah they should get a load of angry bitchy help desk monkeys off the internet as they are the heart of IT and know it all.
Then their logo can be some poorly rendered CGI tits, windows can be called TNT, executioner or iron fist and some in a sick green box.
It needs to just ooze masculinity to help them compensate for being a sissy.
Easy! The yellow represents the yellow smiley face-logo from Microsoft's disastrous past product Microsoft Bob because Microsoft is repeating its past mistake and trying to cater to only the lowest common denominator of its users once again!
(Other than that, the only other yellow-color branded Microsoft product that I can think of off of the top of my head was the cute little fox logo from Microsoft Visual FoxPro. Hmm, they said at the time in 2007 when they end-of-lifed Visual FoxPro that they were doing so because it was COM-based and they didn't want to redevelop it for .Net. Now that the new WinRT application architecture is essentially COM-based again, I wonder what their manufactured excuse would be for not further developing that product now... Well, besides the fact that they already killed it that is.)
Well those were digital computer graphics. Those did take quite a while to render and were quite expensive. Only when the "Videotoaster" came out, it became cheaper.
Just some of the problems. When you do such CGI, you need to store at least one frame. Then you somehow need to record that frame to a VTR. Building a VTR which records one frame is a very non-trivial thing as all the mechanical properties change. So you end up having to rent a specialist computer with a high quality video output, and a special VTR for still frame recording. All very expensive.
It might have been as expensive as a Scanimate setup per hour. The Scanimate was a popular analog computer graphics computer. It cost $2500 an hour back then and provided real time graphics.
http://scanimate.zfx.com/article.html
Fascinating stuff on the Scanimate, thank you Mr Berger. That is why I read the Register.
I've found some info on the Channel 4 ident... reading between the lines, it would appear that wireframe animation was created in England by Systems Simulation Ltd. under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lansdown. Apparently hand-colouring of the computer generated wireframes was tried, before Los Angeles-based Bo Gehring Aviation (http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/no-title/1121699.article) did the whole lot on a computer.
I'm still not clear on who did what and how, but Lansdown did animation for consoles aboard the Nostromo in Ridley Scott's Alien, and Bo Gehring (who was helped by a fellow who went on to SGI) did work for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Clarification would be appreciated!
I also liked the Hamlet Cigar spoof of the Channel 4 logo. Done by the same chaps?
About time they flattened out their nonsensical flag logo, which evolved from a Dali-esque curved window. I'm surprised they didn't do it earlier, when they first unveiled the Metro interface on Windows phones, since it is pretty much the same as that.
Always amused me how so many logos demonstrate how people can't decide whether green or yellow is the third primary colour so they include both.
I suspect the fundamental problem is the nonsensical way we teach children about colour.
For example, “Roy G. Biv” is a lousy way to describe the colours we see, because it conflicts with colour nomenclature. Either it omits cyan, or calls cyan, 'blue' and blue, 'indigo'. It also completely omits magenta, since it only addresses spectral colours.
Magenta is missing; magenta is the emission of red and blue-stimulus photons simultaneously. This can also be accomplished by absorption of green photons from full-spectrum ambient light, which is what magenta ink does.
Until one understands colourspace, and how additive and subtractive colour work, and arguably also how colour spaces are defined, it's hard to generalise laws that depend on colour perception.
Simpler, more abstract ideas about colour lead to design decision ambiguity. Individual designers don't follow consistent rules. Two designers, working independently on the same assignment, will have different final results. That's okay in my books.
Search for "roy g. biv song" on YouTube; you'll see tons of educational songs, including one by They Might Be Giants — which was the original source of my complaint. They are exceptional in kids' music in that (a) they are educational, (b) the music doesn't suck and (c) they nearly always get their facts straight and they value scientific integrity. So this song, on a DVD of science-related tracks, was disappointing for me because they describe the colour spectrum without relating it to how we see colour and with misleading colour names (which Richard of York uses as well).
Our eyes may be approximately RGB sensors, but our brain's visual processing interprets colour differently to this. Colour Opponency is one of the theories that tries to describe the processing of colour, and also explain why, for example, Red and Green are perceived to be more "opposite" from each other than Red and Blue, which actually are furthest apart on the spectrum.
By examining at which colours "fight" each other when put side by side, the Colour Opponent Theory yields four "natural" colours: Green and its opposite, Red; Yellow and its opposite, Blue, plus black and white. ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process )
Most graphic designers will have encountered this theory at college, or will be aware of colour opponency though experience, hence the recurrence of these shades whenever companies ask for "bold colours" in a design. (The old striped Apple logo just added orange and purple to the basic four shades)
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"This wave of new releases is not only a re-imagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning," Hanson said.
The box "is important in a world of digital motion" while the little squares of colour are "intended to express the company's diverse portfolio of products".
Jeezus, it totally stinks of sage in here. Somebody open a window.
...Jesus H. Tap-Dancing CHRIST. Did they pay actual money for this? Oh, who am I kidding; I'm sure they did -- well into six figures, at the very least. Not bad money for about ten minutes' work.
Hell, it looks like they didn't even have to use an actual drawing application to do it, either, or even spend any time trying out different fonts. It looks like it was done by a design department intern, right there in the client meeting, on a laptop with the drawing tools in Word, and the fonts that came installed with it.
I almost feel sorry for Microsoft these days; seems they just can't stop stepping in it.
Here's a house, here's a door.
Windows: 3.1, XP, 7, 8, ready to knock?
Turn the lock - It's the Play School developers.
"One of our three magic windows (c) (tm) can open wide to show both town and countryside, let's go through the . . . . . . . . . . . .Square window. . . . . . . . . . OH MY GOD!!!, it's hideous!!!!!"
You MS haters make me laugh. If it wasn't MS it'd be someone else.
So, they've changed their logo. So what? Looks more modern if you ask me! And who cares how much it cost? I don't!
And anyway, many of you haters are probably sat there in your sandals and socks, so what would you know about design or "fashion"!!! :)
YeaRight
Whatever!
You MS haters make me laugh. If it wasn't MS it'd be someone else.
So, they've changed their logo. So what? Looks more modern if you ask me! And who cares how much it cost? I don't!
And anyway, many of you haters are probably sat there in your sandals and socks, so what would you know about design or "fashion"!!! :)
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And you Microsoft astroturfing shills make my toes laugh. Recently registered on the 23rd August 2012 for a snarky retort on your virgin post?
I hope you're paid well for your efforts.
(Pasted your comment at the top, just in case you decide to sneakily delete it.)
It's not that new at all. The logo is the same as the outlook 2007 categorise icon except a flatter and possibly a couple of the colours switch around.
There's not that much you can do with those colors when creating a relatively simple logo I guess. Unless they want to copy google poke-ball / simon says logo.
Sure, whatever. And Debian is BSD-like.
The typeface that Segoe is, um, reminiscent of is Adrian Frutiger's eponymous "Frutiger" (UK residents will recognise Frutiger from its use as the corporate typeface of the NHS, but its first use was as signage for Charles de Gaulle airport)
While we're at it, this isn't the first time Frutiger has been allegedly "appropriated": the designers of what is now Apple's corporate typeface (Myriad Pro, by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe -- it's the default font in Adobe Illustrator) were also accused of shamelessly ripping off Frutiger.
In any case, the amount you have to change a font by to be considered a "new" face is only about 5%, and it's very easy to hide this in the punctuation, i-dots, and symbols... or the tail of the capital Q
Cinema goes 3D, Microsoft goes 2D
Augmented Reality adds information rich overlays on our 3D world, Microsoft goes flat
Subtle light and shading on realtime mapping, Microsoft goes primary... er, colours
Way to buck the trends Microsoft
And I'm not a MS hating anything - running Win8 now, with a ClassicShell plugin 'cause ModernUI sucks donkey balls, but I've been a windows advocate from version 3.1. I just haven't buried my head in the sand, nor do I think it's any kind of a good design... Tablets and PCs are different! Viva la difference!
Hmmm, right before launching a new OS that is already being regarded as Vista II?
Why not spend an obscene amount on a new logo?
That said, I would have loved to have had the contract to design.... a SQUARE, then smoke top-grade hash for 4 weeks solid to come up with the accompanying design justification and marketing burble.
Yep, mine's the pint.... of absinthe.