Diverse and Connected: Broad Teams Bring Big Success

We’ve created this video to thank the people who joined the collaborative effort to develop our new Microsoft icon system.

Our approach to guiding our brand has evolved in dramatic ways to reflect the cultural changes within Microsoft. One extremely useful change is how the brand studio, product design and engineering, and product marketing teams have committed to working together. The most recent result of this co-creation focus is the icon system celebrated in the video. It’s a system that truly feels like today’s Microsoft.

Our mission was to create a beautiful, moving, coherent icon system, and each discipline added its expertise to the process. We started with design insights into the diverse needs and desires of our customers. We then established a vision to guide the creation of a more coherent system of product icons across the company, based on the connections we found between customer needs and brand needs.

The resulting One Microsoft icon-design language is unique to Microsoft and reflects our brand personality. It pairs luminosity, vibrance, form, and diversity with color, and it connects to the Fluent design language, ensuring accessibility across new types of displays and inputs while, additionally, being adaptable to modern ways of working. The development of each icon group influenced the next. Our guidelines will grow from what we found through our collaboration rather than being something that constrains the work. 

Our desire is to equip creators across the company with the tools to work efficiently in building intuitive, cohesive, and inclusive digital experiences. Because of its openness and its ability to take into account so many more perspectives, co-creation is a far more effective tool for doing diverse work than is the old model of first creating individual guidelines. The detailed or individual needs of each product and service are now more easily connected to the strategic needs of the brand.

Even with broad teams, big successes often depend on the efforts of a few key people. In this case, Lauren Keckley was at the center of our new approach. She made sure that each of us was linked to a wide range of information and possibilities from across various parts of the company. Also, thank you to Jon, Jonah, Ana, and Albert from the Design Leadership Team (DLT) for support throughout the process. And for their contributions, a special thanks to the extended team, including product engineering, marketing, brand, research, legal, trademarking, and others.

The work continues. Since the brand is a living, breathing, always-changing entity, maintaining a cohesive and recognizable visual system is a never-ending process. We’re pleased with the results and overjoyed that our cross-company, multi-disciplinary team collaborated to make it happen. 

Thank you.