Microsoft Goes Old School With Windows 8 Logo
Microsoft has gone back to its roots with its new Windows 8 logo, dropping the flag in favour of a Window
Microsoft has dropped the flag from its Windows 8 logo and adhered to its “Metro” design aesthetic for the forthcoming operating system.
“We realised an evolution of our logo would better reflect our Metro style design principles,” Sam Moreau, principal director of Microsoft’s User Experience for Windows, wrote in a 17 February posting on The Windows Blog.
Window Logo
Unlike previous iterati
ons of the Windows logo, which embraced wavy lines to the point where people mistook it for a flag, the revised Windows 8 logo is clearly, well, a window. “If you look back at the origins of the logo you see that it really was meant to be a window,” he wrote. We did less of a re-design and more to return it to its original meaning and bring Windows back to its roots.”
It’s perhaps ironic that, despite Windows’ logo returning to its roots, Windows 8 represents something of a radical deviation from the “traditional” Windows user interface. In a bid to run effectively on both tablets and PCs, Windows 8 features a “Metro”-style “start” screen of colourful tiles linked to applications – the better to tap and swipe, if the device running the OS happens to feature a touch-screen.
Power users and those who want the old-style Windows experience can flip from there to a fully actualised desktop, which has undergone some tweaks of its own.
Windows On ARM
Microsoft executives claim that Windows 8 will offer “no compromises” in either its tablet or traditional PC iterations. Indeed, Windows on ARM (the architecture that powers many of today’s mobile devices and that Microsoft has started referring to using the acronym “WOA”) will feature a modified version of “Office 15,” the upcoming version of Microsoft’s Office software.
“Within the Windows desktop, WOA includes desktop versions of the new Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, code-named ‘Office 15,’” Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Live division, wrote in a 9 February posting on the corporate Building Windows 8 blog. “WOA will be a no-compromise product for people who want to have the full benefits of familiar Office productivity software and compatibility.”
Because of its presence on tablets, Microsoft will face competition from Apple’s iPad and a big family of Google Android devices. Even on PCs, where the Windows franchise has long dominated, Microsoft will need to overcome many users’ likely reluctance to upgrade from Windows 7.
However it fares in those battles, at least Microsoft will have a nifty new logo.
