In a Medium post today, Microsoft went into detail about designing new icons again. But rather than just new Office icons, this time the company showed off a wider array of images.
Some of the icons seen in the image above were previously shown off, while some weren't. There are new icons for Notepad and Paint, which have icons that haven't been changed in some time. Obviously, they're meant to be more modern. The Mobile Data app is getting more colorful as well.
All-in-all, Microsoft says that it redesigned over 100 icons. There's even a new Windows logo on there in different colors, although that was shown off previously. In the blog post, Jon Friedman said that taking an icon theme from 10 products and scaling it to over 100 was "both daunting and thrilling".
After all, it was a pretty broad endeavor on a company-wide range of products. Different design teams and different product teams all needed to get together on this, as one of the rare times that Microsoft made an effort on consistency across consumer, small business, and enterprise products. Of course, it's still unclear if there will be consistency in when these icons are released.
The new icons are based on the Fluent Design System, Microsoft's new design language that's meant to translate between a "diverse yet connected system". The idea is that these icons will appear on a wide range of device types, screen sizes, and form factors.
Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't actually say when these new icons will be available. Hopefully they all come as one feature update for Windows 10, rather than as single app updates over the course of months.
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