Visual StudioCopied

Developers stare at their tools all day, so Microsoft treated a change of icons as a big deal. In 2017 it began rolling out a new family of icons for Visual Studio, explained in a post by John Lea, head of the design studios behind Microsoft's developer tools. The familiar purple infinity stayed, but with what he called a promotion: in its classic dark purple it now stood for the whole Visual Studio suite, from the flagship IDE to Team Services, Blend and Mobile Center.

The trigger was confusion. Users had long complained that they could not tell Visual Studio products apart; Visual Studio Code and Team Services, for example, both had light blue icons, and Lea admitted that even Microsoft's own designers could not always say which blue was which. Several design teams across three continents competed on concepts. The rules were strict: new icons had to read as extensions of the infinity, so they followed its underlying two point perspective grid, its thin left and thick right verticals, and its straight lines and sharp angles, like a folded ribbon.

The result was a system. The main IDE now uses a lighter purple infinity with a stylised border, and that border frames the other product icons, each of which carries its own pictogram so products can be told apart without relying on colour alone. Visual Studio for Mac sets the infinity on a rotated macOS style square with extra shading for the Dock. Lea said the point of all the effort was to make developers' jobs easier and let them click with confidence.

Visual Studio Magazine covered the related new Code icon and the predictable grumbling from developers, some of whom said the new marks blended together at small sizes. LogoLounge quoted the Code team's Chris Dias saying they explored editor symbols before settling on a fragment of the infinity meant to suggest openness and a hint of the letter V.

As family design goes, this is disciplined and sensible. Shared geometry and a common frame make the suite read as one thing, and pictograms are a smarter differentiator than slightly different blues. The cost is personality: individual icons lose some of their punch in the name of consistency, and the complaints about small sizes show the limits of a strict system.