Typophile - Microsoft Silverlight Logo : A Trend or Laziness? - Comments

yes, cars are 3d and the

andreas — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:27:06 -0800

yes, cars are 3d and the target market is totally different. But the Mercedes sign went into 3d street, like many other signs. Now its back to classic since “real” things are simple. :-)

The Silverlight identity

James Puckett — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:34:46 -0800

The Silverlight identity does not feel safe. It feels aspirational, open-ended and unbounded. This will easily be relevant for the the 5+ years needed to become widely adopted. I think Hiroshige and Nick are right, it feels very current.

Well said.

Sometimes I look at the great design of the twentieth century and feel the same way a lot of people do when they see stuff like the silverlight logo. A big white page with a couple lines of text set in Helvetica? Ick. I think it’s the design equivalent of the “my five year old could paint that” comment that inevitably pops out of someones mouth at least once every five minutes at every modern art museum. It’s probably just part of the human condition.

The cars are still 3D

sii — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:21:37 -0800

The cars are still 3D thought, right? ;-)

BTW. The new design of

andreas — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:38:06 -0800

BTW. The new design of Mercedes Benz brand is going back to simple flat shapes.

http://www.mercedes-benz.de -
http://www.fontblog.de/mercedes-benz-fuehrt-neues-markendesign-ein

—astype.de—

Mason, I enjoyed reading

Joe Pemberton — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 22:00:47 -0800

Mason, I enjoyed reading your comments. I was at SBI Razorfish when the former SBI folks were redesigning the MS Office Suite identity — there is nothing lazy about MS identity design.

I’m very curious to watch Microsoft branding and product development these days. You can see how Office and Windows brands feel very constrained by old boundaries (legacy branding has recognition, but it’s an albatross when it comes to evolving an aging brand). However, you can see great innovation happening with Zune and Xbox — with print, television, UI that feels very current and innovative.

I hope you know that where I

Sharon Van Lieu — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 18:49:25 -0800

I hope you know that where I come from, saying something looks like a folded compact lens is the highest of compliments. :-)

Sharon

PS - thanks for the background

I enjoyed reading this

Mason Flint — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 17:53:44 -0800

I enjoyed reading this discussion on the Silverlight logo and thought I’d add my perspective. I managed the development of the Silverlight brand name and identity at Microsoft. To be clear - I am not a designer nor an expert in production. I’m a brand strategy guy. We worked with an outside partner on the logo design and rely on in-house and external partners to design and produce content that incorporate the logo.

What I can comment on is what our thinking was as we developed this logo. Silverlight is a tool for designers and software developers who are creating something of their own. Ultimately they control the design of the experiences they create with Silverlight. We explored a wide range of options for the logo including more traditional approaches like those designed around real objects (e.g. the shield shape of the UPS logo or the Apple of the Apple logo) that some on this forum noted. We ultimately decided that a design that was more open and without boundaries was more fitting with the Silverlight concept. I’m going out a bit on a limb here but in some respects Silverlight is somewhat amorphous, only taking shape after a designer creates something using it. We didn’t want to box it in by creating an overly literal logo.

We entered into the design process thinking animation first, static online second and print a very distant third. The static logo you see above was taken from a frame of an animation that we created. While technology and bandwidth doesn’t always make it possible to display the logo in high quality animated form, that’s our goal when possible. We knew that we would need to create static versions, print was not a priority. Silverlight was designed to be native to the Web. The idea of printing it black and white in newsprint is totally counter to what Silverlight is about.

There are certainly downsides to this approach but overall we’re pretty happy with the results and the response we’ve seen/heard to the design. We’re aware of the challenges in using this logo effectively and I’ve already seen some scary examples of “design” that are off-brand. We work hard to limit this by creating guidance that we provide to our design/agency partners and in most cases they do great work.

I hope this gives you a glimpse into how we approached this project. Feedback on the forum or via mail is welcome.

Mason Flint
Microsoft Corp.

I think that visual

sihep — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:30:04 -0800

I think that visual identities for software are slightly different to corporate identities proper. The ID for a program only really has to exist on a CD cover/packaging and on screen when you start the thing up. The ’ghost fart’ would obviously look lousy on a business card at 133lpi in 2 colours but it isn’t ever going to end up there - the Microsoft logo is still just 1 colour and Adobe 2. At the same time there does seem to be a trend towards 3D in visual identities for corporations, the first ones I remember being Silicon Graphics and Astra Zeneca (which sort of looks like strings of melted cheese).

I guess if looking like a

dezcom — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:22:48 -0800

I guess if looking like a hooker is what you are after...

ChrisL

the traditional sense of how

John Hudson — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:53:06 -0800

the traditional sense of how a logo should function has been steamrolled by cheap 4-color printing.

That and the Internet. Traditional flat logos can seem dull in a colourful, interactive environment. Companies don’t want their logo to be the most boring thing on a web page, so they tart it up, make it look three dimensional, make it rotate, throb, etc.

I wish the logo was the

twardoch — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:35:30 -0800

I wish the logo was the problem. The logo is fine. But Microsoft’s corporate communication that talks about Silverlight is just BEYOND SCARY. Take a look at the PDF examples one, two, three, four, five or six.

It’s just a random sample of what Google gave me. I just clicked on the first few links and could not find anything that looked remotely reasonable, maybe except this but even that is completely derivative. Sad and scary.

The important question to

ragnarfreyr — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:06:51 -0800

The important question to ask is where is the tutorial? ;)

—
Ragnar Freyr
www.ragnarfreyr.com

Printing is not a

DavM — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:03:29 -0800

Printing is not a problem?
Lets say, have this logo printed three times on three different print houses and you’ll get 3 different colors. That doesnt help brand experience & recognition at all. Thats the main difference between these random generated million color logos and the 2d ones as you call it.

It’s very clever. If the

Nick Shinn — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:01:59 -0800

It’s very clever.
If the Nike swoosh was emblematic in a flat, still way, this takes all the smoke, frills, swirls, swashes and general embellishment of contemorary design illustration, and encapsulates it in a polymorphous dimensional icon. Surely the mother of all these marks is a randomly generating animation?

As much as I hate to do this

Hiroshige — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:26:04 -0800

As much as I hate to do this I’m going to lean towards this logo as being very much a part of our time and a harbinger of things to come. I’m not surprized to see this form of graphic from Microsoft, and perhaps its a little late in coming. Architects like Hadid have been constructing these forms for a while now, so this can hardly be called a passing trend. And with the advance of computer driven design, on all levels of society, it seems that Microsoft is placing itself as a relevant part of our ’modern’ society.

The other crap that looks like it was puked from a photoshop filter/layer stlye, is very much a narrow representation of society which barely has any relevance on any level of society at all.

canderson, that design is just great.

Microsoft Silverlight Logo : A Trend or Laziness?

satya — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 06:55:44 -0800

Hello Typophiles,

Now a days it has almost become a trend of having those glossy,
shiny and stylish gradient logos. The Microsoft Silverlight logo
would be a perfect example to give. I know that lots of people
didn’t liked it and were screaming when it was released. But why?
Why can’t we have such logos? Personally I loved it and have no
problem with having such logos even in the future also. Logo
is just an identity and anything can be logo as far as its unique
and easy to remember. Earlier, the printing was a big problem
and we use to prefer flat logos but, why now?

What you all think?

Satya