Office Identity Makeover - What Were They Thinking?

Companies redesign their logos for many reasons -- they're either old, out-of-style, or an overly ambitious marketing director was recently hired. Whatever the reason, I always take notice whenever a company tinkers with their image.

With the imminent release of Office v. X for Mac, Microsoft's marketing team has decided to totally overhaul Office's image, from the box down to the clickable icons. Truth is, they needed to do something to the old logos to take advantage of the new 32-bit environment of Apple's OSX, in all it's liquefied Aqua glory.

But perhaps Microsoft got a little overly ambitious. Compare the logos from the last version of Office to the new, "improved" ones.

Now, truth be told, I don't like either all that much, but the old ones illustrate an enormous flaw in the revised bunch -- symbolic reference to real world items and objects people understand. Notice the clever fold in the "E" of "Entourage" that subtly conveys an envelope, the admittedly less clever, but still effective, 35mm slides surrounding the "P" of PowerPoint, etc. You can glance at them without any knowledge of what they "do" and pretty accurately guess their intent.

On the other hand, the new versions are slicked up, gooey letters that convey nothing. Can you honestly look at the "X" of Excel and figure out what it does? What about the "W" of Word? Nope. They could be logos for Oakley sunglasses, or a new brand of snowboard. But Office applications?

I bring this up not just because I think they utterly fail (and are butt ugly), but because I suspect there could be underlying reasons behind Microsoft's decision. In continuation of the "Mac is a toy" rant I had yesterday, these icons will absolutely not appeal to anyone over the age of 40 -- Microsoft's bread and butter corporate clients (the same ones getting screwed with new licensing requirements, but that's a different story).

In Microsoft's admittedly noble quest to create contrast between platforms, they have purposely set Office for the Mac apart by using a style that looks hip and trendy -- words of death to any pencil pushing corporate environment. Nevermind the fact that the Mac version of Office is (I'll admit it) amazing, incredibly powerful, well crafted, and possibly better than it's Windows counterpart, for with an image like this corporate users will likely think it's somehow "different" and stay away.

Okay, sorry, I took off my conspiracy hat. The main point of this rant is that substance, and clear interface references, win out every time over style. Period.