Microsoft (2012)Copied

On 23 August 2012 Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo, its first major change in 25 years, The Verge reported. It arrived ahead of what the company called one of the most significant waves of product launches in its history: Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Xbox services, a new Office and the Surface tablet, all sharing a common look across PCs, phones, tablets and TVs.

Microsoft said the logo drew on its product design principles and the heritage of its brand values, fonts and colours. It has two parts. The logotype is set in Segoe, the typeface Microsoft already used in its products and marketing. The symbol, four squares of colour, is meant to express the company's diverse portfolio, and Microsoft said it mattered in a world of digital motion. The Verge noted it was the first time the Microsoft wordmark had been accompanied by an image, and that the multicoloured symbol was one typically found on Windows products. A Microsoft brand executive told the Seattle Times, as The Verge relayed, that the aim was to signal the heritage but also the future, a newness and freshness.

The rollout started immediately on Microsoft.com, which the company described as the tenth most visited website in the world, and in three of its retail stores, with all its TV ads to sign off with the new logo. Microsoft warned that the old logo would linger in some places for a while. It also stressed that the brand was more than logos: with more than a billion people using its products daily, those experiences were its most important brand impressions.

The Verge tied the change directly to the new Windows 8 look.

The Seattle Times got the reasoning from Jeff Hansen, Microsoft's general manager of brand strategy. Nearly every product, from Windows to Windows Phone to Office, was about to ship with a cleaner, tile-based look, so it felt like the right moment to express that newness in the corporate mark. The Segoe wordmark kept one subtlety from 1987, the joined f and t. For the first time the logo carried a symbol, four squares in the blue, orange, green and yellow long used across the product brands, meant to signal the diversity of products and people served; the paper noted the irony that Windows 8's own logo had just gone single-coloured. The mark debuted at the opening of Microsoft's 23rd store, in Boston.

It was a smart consolidation. Pairing Segoe with flat squares aligned a sprawling company with its most visible product at exactly the right time, and the four colours carried decades of Windows memory. The symbol is almost too simple, which is a strength.