BingCopied

In September 2013 Microsoft unveiled a new Bing logo as part of a broader redesign of the search engine, rebuilt from the ground up with a responsive layout for PC, tablet and phone. The Verge reported the logo had been a year in the making.

The old Bing wordmark was curly, soft and blue. The new one is angular: a stylised lowercase b, sharp and lined up with the Segoe typeface used for the wordmark, matching the rest of Microsoft's recently redesigned product branding. After what Microsoft's Ripsher called literally dozens of colour experiments, Microsoft picked an orange so warm it looks almost golden.

The details tie Bing to its parent. The wordmark is customised Segoe; the cut on the b mirrors the t in the Microsoft logo, the i and n are kerned exactly as in the Windows wordmark, and the orange-yellow takes inspiration from one quadrant of the Microsoft flag while nodding to the old orange dot. Scott Erickson, senior director of brand and creative, told Mashable the team was heavily influenced by Swiss design, and Bing said it had tested hundreds of studies, mock ads and fictitious billboards.

The design came from Microsoft's own teams. Ripsher described it as a new framework for colour, fonts and spacing that would let the team adjust variables independently.

Reaction was polite. In The Drum, Aesop's Harriet Beesley said Bing had grown up but lost some bounce and that the font suited body copy more than a logo; Logo Design Love called it definitely an upgrade.

The Verge detailed what the logo was wrapped around. The daily Bing image stayed as the entry point, but a feature called Page Zero now offered answers as you typed, for example helping pick the right person between two with similar names, and Pole Position promised a new area at the top of results. Lawrence Ripsher, a Bing design lead, called the logo obviously a big deal, more angular, fresh and sharper than before. A sharper mark launched with genuinely new search features is the right pairing; the logo had something to announce.

The timing was awkward. Bing's mark arrived just after Yahoo's new logo had drawn criticism from typographers, and comparisons were inevitable. Bing's is the more disciplined of the two. Pulling the search engine into the Segoe family was the right call for brand coherence, but the gold-orange was a strange choice for a challenger to Google, a colour that said warm and safe when Bing needed to be noticed.