Microsoft Office icons get their first redesign in 5 years

REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

• Microsoft Office is getting
  a new set of icons, the company announced on its Medium blog.
• All your favorite tools — Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Skype —
  are getting fresh icon designs for the first time since 2013,
  which you can check out below.
• The redesign is to reflect Office’s move toward a cloud-based
  suite of tools that are used and accessible from a multitude of
  devices and platforms. 

For students and desk workers all over the world, the Microsoft
Office app icons are, ahem, iconic. 

But now, every single one of those icons is getting a refresh
across all platforms “in the coming months,”
Microsoft said in a blog post — their first new look in five
years. 

All of those well-known logos will be getting upgrades, including
Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and even Skype. The color
palettes for each of the icons will, fortunately, remain the
same, with some slightly updated hues that are brighter and more
modern-looking.

Without further ado, here’s the new lineup, as compared with the
2013-era icons:

Top row, left to right: Microsoft Outlook, OneDrive,
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Bottom row, left to right: OneNote,
SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and Skype.
Microsoft

It’s
out with the old, and in with the new for Microsoft
Office.

Microsoft
Design

The idea, says Microsoft, is to reflect the change that Office is
now less of a software suite, and more of a set of cloud-based
services you use from a variety of devices. 

“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,” Jon
Friedman, Microsoft Office’s design head,  said in the blog
post. 

How
the icon for Microsoft Word has changed over time since
2003.

Microsoft
Design

Microsoft Office has come a long way since its first
software bundle
was released in 1990 featuring just three apps: Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint. This is the longest Microsoft has gone without
updating its Office icons since 2003.