{"id":682,"date":"2012-09-15T23:12:29","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T23:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thisbloglife.com\/?p=677"},"modified":"2026-01-08T18:07:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T18:07:16","slug":"microsoft-logo-design-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thatkeith.com\/articles\/microsoft-logo-design-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft logo design history"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back on August 23rd (note: this was written in 2012) Microsoft announced something new. It wasn’t software, and it wasn’t hardware: it was a new corporate logo, launched officially as it opened its new store in Boston, Massachusets. Technically it appeared in July on new keyboards and mice, but a slight fudging of the unveiling is not the point. This redesign is the first one for a quarter of a century. Sure, there have been Windows logo redesigns a-plenty \u2013 we’ll look at that in a minute \u2013 but the identity for Microsoft itself, not Windows, has been all but sacrosanct since 1987. The core visual identity was nailed down back then, and through everything that’s happened since, good and bad \u2013 Windows 3, 95, NT, XP and Vista, assorted Office versions and assorted court cases, Xbox, Zune, and so on \u2013 the ‘Pac-Man’ identity, so called because of the cut in the letter c, remained. But it wasn’t always like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before 1987 Microsoft had dabbled with a couple of different designs, or three if you count something spotted in a 1982 issue of Creative Computing. The first logo was from 1975, and boy, did it ever look like it:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Both the far-out concentric lines and splitting the name across two lines was to be very short lived; the same year ushered in a new design (2) as a single word and with a funky O, nicknamed the ‘blibbet’:<\/p>\n\n\n

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This lasted until ’87, a twelve-year stretch. When the change was announced there was some resistance to losing the blibbet, but, whatever you think of the Microsoft’s logo evolution, you’ll probably agree that the Pac-Man design was better than what it replaced:<\/p>\n\n\n

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(That third design in 1982? That was used in a classified ad, and it looks something like a retro cross between the Metallica and Anthrax band logos. It probably got its creator a major rap over the knuckles for ignoring corporate identity guidelines, but yep, it was technically from Microsoft. Ouch.)<\/p>\n\n\n

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I’ve no idea what fonts were used for the early designs, or even if they were from regular fonts at all or rather the product of a drawing pen and steady hand. The Pac-Man design from 1987 used a very tightly set Helvetica Black Oblique. (I know most places say Helvetica Bold, but it’s much heavier than that.) The new font uses Segoe instead, the Frutiger-inspired font family thats been the standard face for the company’s advertising for the last few years. It’s a clean, clear sans serif design that’s, well… perhaps a little boring. Would you disagree? I mean, it’s competent and unfussy, serious but not old-fashioned \u2013 a professional, safe implementation. It’s a well-designed typeface, but in the way it’s used: dull.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Along with the type there’s a separate graphic part of the logo, a symbol that’s clearly derived from the Windows logos that have been morphing about since Windows 95. This is the first time there’s been anything other than type as part of the Microsoft company logo, discounting the funked-up parts of letters in the first couple of examples. Now there are four squares in four colours, the famous red\/yellow\/blue\/green hues that say “Windows” the world over:<\/p>\n\n\n

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But wait, what? This isn’t the Windows logo, this is the Microsoft one. And guess what? There’s a new logo for Windows 8 \u2013 and it’s dropped the four colours from its set of squares, using just a flat light blue colour (which is sometimes translucent) in the new, flattened-in-perspective windowpane graphic. It’s almost as if someone had sat up, straightened their corporate-approved tie, and said, “Hey, you know what would be really crazy…?”<\/p>\n\n\n

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What’s a little curious about the Microsoft logos, new and old, is that there’s precious little information about who designed them. The long-lived Pac-Man design was created by Scott Baker, but there’s not much more detail than that. The new Windows identity was created by Paula Scher of design heavyweight Pentagram, but remember, that’s not the Microsoft identity. I’m still not sure where the core Microsoft logo came from \u2013 or even if it was developed inside or outside the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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