What is Digg?157 Comments
- aptget, on 10/12/2007, -18/+48Wow, this is funny. It's OSX inspired, yet it's ugly since it's Microsoft.
To quote: "If it weren't Microsoft, everyone would be drooling." - Bilbobaggins, on 10/12/2007, -9/+32I actually like them, they're more modern than the old ones(obviously). They just seem like they fit in with Office 2007 and Vista, the sort of glossy look that they have.
- CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -14/+33You are, retarded.
- Scruffydan, on 10/12/2007, -10/+27They are JUST Icons. who cares?
I always liked the current icons. - kettlechips, on 10/12/2007, -8/+21If you needed a reason to upgrade to Office 2007, this is it.
- Jimzip, on 10/12/2007, -6/+18Actually, even though the icons don't make much sense (I couldn't tell which was which, I assumed green was excel and blue 'W' was Word..) it doesn't look all bad.
Sure, it's candy coated, and their little annotation that they make people want to 'hug and kiss' office is just stupid, but the site itself and the icons look pretty nice.
Having said that, if I couldn't tell what the icons were at a glance, and I'm a designer, chances are the average Office user won't either. They should be re-designed to be more apparent to what they represent before release... But who knows.. It's MS after all..
Jimzip :D - nreynolds, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19Wait, they have round corners? I'm so getting Office now.
- CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Yeah, but at least its a break from ubuntu blogs.
- bflfab, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14By the time I put them down in the quick launch and have my resolution set the way I like I barely notice the details of the actual icon. As long as it stays:
Mustard - Outlook
Blue - Word
Green - Excel
Red - PowerPoint
then I just don't care what they look like. - fungifred, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15Please don't campare these to icons in OS X, they look nothing like them, and are not nearly as thought-out. Make all these icons grayscale and they all look the same. You need to be able to recognize an icon in an instant without ever having to take a second look and these fail at that.
When I look at my Dock, I don't see 6 icons that all look the same, I see 6 icons each with distinct colors and shapes that make it easy to pick out the right app without having to focus on them.
No Designer would ever consider these icons good.
I give Microsoft an A for effort but they get a D for execution. - calvinkcox, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Fits with the Vista feel for sure... to bad you can't really tell what they are supposed to mean. Seems to be a standard feature of Vista (Who Knows... WTF... and It's Hidden So Deep You Can't Find It.)
- dickeytk, on 10/12/2007, -6/+15I agree, and i'll probably grow to like them more
- DudeRoks, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13It seems to fit with the whole vista feel.
- theone3, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13"FWIW, I don't think they look much like OS X but that's beside the point"
No, it's not. It defeats your entire argument. And further, I think they do have a design philosophy. Pragmatism. Their philosophy is to gracefully get out of the way.
Office examples: Tabbed Ribbons, Left-to-right Outlook design, Little fady floaty thing, Office Jewel file menu and Usage-based Menus (Office 03), Quick access toolbar, search everywhere, intergrated help.
As far as gloss, sharpness, blurryness, colours, etc. I don't see why all design-in-vogue is immediately attributed to Apple in the first place. It's an industry-wide design craze. The last one was all about gradients (2001 - attributed to XP). Before that, it was complicated photoshop image mixes with boxes in them (1999 - attributed to .com boom). Now it's rounded corners, gloss and stupidly disproportionate logos (2003 - attributed to apple, web 2.0), the next one will probably be the vista style of blurry translucency, and then very probably suave 3d animated effects and massive font sizes. But at the end of the day, it's a trend, and nothing more. - paradoxic, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12I agree. They are nice and fresh, gotta keep making changes like this to bear being on a computer years on end.
- hubble, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Is it a problem when some of them just don't really have any relevance to the application function or name?
- kevinski, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Nice and simplistic. I like them.
- JoshTheBoss, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7That bold red phrase stood out to me also. I'm surprised they readily admit that! The worst and most disgusting part was, "The end result is software that our customers want to wrap their arms around and kiss."
What were they thinking?!? - computerdude33, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I like the icons, but they could use just a tad more shinyness.
Personally, I think they don't look like they'd fit in with Vista. I might be wrong though. - theone3, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10"I always liked the current icons."
It's funny. When those were released, everyone complained about how ugly & trend-based they were, and how they wanted the old ones back. - senmu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8"People spend more time with Office than the love of their life...The end result is software that our customers want to wrap their arms around and kiss."
That's right Microsoft, there's people who wanna make sweet love to your software :P - estvir, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6they've almost finished getting rid of all the old icons/bitmaps, they were just place holders; try build 5456, compard to beta2 they've updated a few _hundred_ icons/bitmaps.
to see the effort they're going into with the design of icons and so on, look for interviews with someone called 'jenny lam' (if i remember correctly) and it will give alot of insight. - anphanax, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Left-To-Right, Top-To-Bottom:
Word, InfoPath, Outlook
Visio, Access, Excel
MSChart, Publisher, PowerPoint
OneNote, (No Idea), (No Idea)
I'm guessing one of the (No Idea)s is a graphic editing program of some sort. - hobg, on 10/12/2007, -8/+11I liked 'em.
- muramasa, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4estvir:
I saw it on my room-mates PC, I haven't used Windows in over 3 years. I guess he had an older version of Vista. I guess that's good news then. - wedderburn, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6they look good but too much detail.. good thing they're colour coded or else ppl would stay 5 seconds hovering their mouse wondering what to click
- aHellerax, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8They look great to me.
/shrug - vincnet1000, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7I am not really trained in graphic design, but can any of the people that said it look bad please explain to me why?
I think these new icons looks much better than the older icons:
1. They kept the same color scheme
2. The icons are informative as to which office apps they are refering to
The round edge icons looks like buttons for Digg site, and I think they look pretty good. - Kazbaeden, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Wow, you can keep your two cents. As a general rule, you should never say "Omg, C copied B!" because someone is going to be able to tell you that B copied A. People are taking ideas from other people all the time and adapting them. That's the wonderful thing about humanity; we can't keep our ideas and innovations to ourselves, and therefore they flow through different minds and adapt accordingly.
Just try a little thought experiment and try to imagine a world where only one person, group, or corporation comes up with every idea ever, then go back and read your comment again and you'll see how inane it is. - muramasa, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7The look of these icons compared to other MS icons is totally different. Some icons in Vista are left over from Win 95 and look really ***** awful, especially when they're sitting right next to icons created for Vista/Office 2007, Win XP icons, 2K icons. It's insanity.
Considering how much money Microsoft has already wasted on Vista, would it really hurt them to pay someone to put together a proper icon set. - freebies, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3My first impressions of the icons are that they are a little bit Web 2.0ish and they lack any visual punch. Aside from Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook, I could not easily guess what the other icons are unless I went through the list of products in my head. I have stared at the purple icon with a rectangular box and two arrows for awhile, but I still cannot think of what the product is. As long as they are consistent with each other and they have text labels underneath them, then they are alright icons.
- spyres, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wow, pretty ugly. Even the open source guys at the Tango project are doing a much better job than this in making the graphics clearly identifiable.
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library - SYSDmg, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9i also agree, i think microsoft finally realises that looking good is important
- poesybeater, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3(1) They look pretty bland/washed-out to me.
(2) Besides Word and Excel, I don't think I could tell you the purpose of any other icon in the set.
(3) Too cartoony (in a clip art sort of way) for my tastes
(4) The design looks dated by about 5 years
(5) Can anyone tell me how to turn off numbered lists in Word?
(6) Thanks - defectDS, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Aptget, why'd you go turn this into a OS war?
I for one like them, but I find them kinda cartoony. :P - DarkDays, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well I like some of these better:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/18203859/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/32587372/ - Trams, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No excuse for them to be any less quality, these are vector as well, take a look...
http://iconbase.com/iconbase/bluesky-eps.html - poipoipoi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3icons are supposed to EXPLODE off the screen at you. they're supposed to be simple, clear, little colored shapes that scale up and down easily.
if you guys are looking for some sort of magical definition of beauty, try the louvre or something. - senmu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6If they're going along with this type of marketing, they might as well put this on their Vista page:
"People spend more time checking Windows XP for viruses than they do with their kids...The end result is that hopefully you won't have to with Vista." - morphie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4"Wow, this is funny. It's OSX inspired, yet it's ugly since it's Microsoft.
To quote: If it weren't Microsoft, everyone would be drooling."
OSX inspired? The website maybe, but the icons and theme of MS Office 2007 is certainly not. :) - inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Can one of the 7 people who buried my previous comment please explain why. If you disagree, explain why, but I thought that was pretty levelheaded and politely expressed. Is it being buried by people who disagree or what?
- estvir, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6umm, pretty much all those free ones on the various theme sites are just the normal icon covered in 'gloss' from various photoshop tutorials; these ones are better.
also, most of those free ones are low quality or resolution-specific. - nxtwrld, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Looks like MS is more efficient in producing screenshots and icons of upcoming sofware rather than producing the software itself. I guess Windows Vista and Office2007 will come out when published screenshots compared lines of code will reach 1:1 ratio. ;-)
- aknowles5139, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They look pretty nice.
Most people are saying they look bad because there not used glossy icons in XP... they'll like them when Vista rolls its way out of Microsoft. - timmyallen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2so we have decided to go with the classic style off gloss that any one that owns photoshop can do...??
time to ask some inconist/skinners from deviantART, WinCustomize for some inspiration :) - torpy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yea, that's true, the colours are a deeply ingrained part of the icons and most importantly, the two most used programs (Excel, Word) still retains their letters as part of the icons "W" and "X". Not a bad redesign, I quite like it, it's huge step away from the current 2k3 icons, which I absolutely hate, I'm currently using the mac iconset as replacements for them, can't stand 'em.
- actorboy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4That would be my question. From the page:
"Human-Centered Design
We employ an iterative design and development process using product-design researchers trained in cognitive and experimental psychology, industrial engineering, and human-computer interaction."
Looks to me like I would have a little trouble finding the icon to open the program I want. If it's MS Word, why not just make the icon look like a document? It can still look cool, just make it easy to spot. Icons are great at dressing up your system, but ultimately it's their time-saving functionality I need. - BevansDesign, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Look pretty good.
Yea, they're definitely influenced by OSX icon style (which MS has helped to define with their nice shiny Mac Office icons), but if you look at a lot of graphic design these days, there's a whole lot of shininess going around. The OSX icons look great (the rest of the OS looks like ass - brushed metal was only cool for about a year), and they're influential. - Escamillo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Access has used a "key" icon for years, I think since its inception.
- LadyBatChic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"The fresh, new product icons are a reflection of the meticulous attention to detail used in this release as they visually complement the ribbon and the branding style while still helping users quickly locate an Office program." Oh, and the colours are nice.
Like anything, we get used to recognizing a brand as a symbolic key to language. A symbol. I have gotten so used to my Microsoft icons that I don't need to think about what they represent. Enter a new product line of icons to refer to, and the recognition process needs to be integrated all over again. But I think the public relations people at Microsoft must be happy. . . I bet lot of $$$ went into the design department just to make up the jargon to help sell the product. "The results are grounded, innovative and utilitarian designs that solve real problems for real people" Well, how un-real do they think I am? -
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