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Post Update: 19th February 2012
Now that the official statement on the Windows 8 logo published by Pentagram the perspective issue that I pointed out in the post below is now a mute issue.
It also appears that the version of the Windows 8 logo referenced by myself and many other websites is NOT the version designed by Pentagram. You will notice that their design (image above) has the stroke thickness of the vertical and horizontal lines set much much thinner.
Pentagram also cover the reasoning for the equal thickness lines as being based on classical perspective drawing rather than computer perspective. I still think this looks odd, but at least there is an official line for that particular design direction.
“The perspective drawing is based on classical perspective drawing, not computerized perspective. The cross bar stays the same size no matter the height of the logo, which means it has to be redrawn for each time it increases in size, like classic typography.”
This also is a good example of trying to be too clever for your own boots—that is a direct reference back to me—and not waiting for an official description before going off all half-cocked. I personally wouldn’t bother reading anything below mostly because it makes me look like a real dick.
Read More on the Windows 8 Logo by Pentagram
A lot of press coverage over the announcement of the new Windows 8 logo design, and with that has come a substantial quantity of mixed thoughts. Note: There was a story running last weekend reporting that the Windows 8 logo was a fake design, and I pretty much got sucked up with that, but it now seems to be very much official.
The Official Windows 8 Logo Brief
To get right down to it I’m not overly offended by this new Metro style of design that Windows 8 is based on.
In fairness to the Windows brand, we have a common theme being addressed (the window pane) as well as the rather specific name in Windows which doesn’t leave a whole lot of visual choices for us to base a logo design around. Hard to reinvent a window without resorting to something dramatically stylised which is not really an option given the Windows logo design heritage.
If this has been a logo for something totally different and from a totally different brand than Microsoft then my overall thoughts would likely be quite different, and by different I mean not so, “I’m not overly offended…“.
There is, however, one design detail that does bother me, and I just can’t stop being bothered by it. I have tried to see a plausable reason for it, but I just keep coming back to it being a design flaw rather than a purposeful feature.
Those pesky window frames.
It’s all about the perspective and the simple fact that the white dividing lines would/should/ought to—I like to think this is a reasonable conclusion—increase in width the further left-to-right background/foreground it goes. Instead, the white dividing lines remain constant and seemingly don’t work/run/flow with that quite dramatic off-the-page perspective.
It’s one of those details for me that makes it look like it’s either: trying too hard to not be realistic in any reasonable form, or it was just missed all together. There are no hard/fast right/wrong rules with logo design, but there are some things that just cause murmurings amongst the design fraternity.
So going back to last weekend when I first saw reports that the Windows 8 logo was a fake: it was this feature that led me to assume that it could quite possibly be a fake as this surely would not have been in an official design? So I was wrong on that front.
I have, so far, not seen design feature this picked up by any other critic so am I am just being particularly particular?
Read more on Windows 8 logo design over on WindowsTeamBlog.
Related Posts
- → Finally – Windows 8 Logo Redesign is Cracked
- → Windows 8 Logo Update—More on the Official Line from Pentagram
- → AP (Associated Press) Rebrand by Objective Subject
- → More4 Rebrand by ManvsMachine
Its very flat and amatuer looking. What happened to the 3-dimensional look of 2012 most logos are taking on these days? Image is everything. This looks like a step backwards. I really hope this is a mock-up.
Graham, yesterday I had the same feeling with the perspective lines, and we even had a debate with a couple of our designers here, for me, it’s an error, I mean, a perspective error, I’m sure, that like u said: There are no hard/fast right/wrong rules with logo design… designers behind this logo did it intentionally, they wanted to remove the realism (3D perspective, shines, shadows, textures) from their final concept, but I’m not thinking as a designer, but as a standard user, like my father, who will say: uhm, there’s something wrong here.
If they wanted to make it unreal, abstract, metro… why the perspective ?
Interesting opinions. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the i next to the W. looks odd.
The perspective bothers me, too, but so does the kerning in the letters. I don’t know if my eyes are deceiving me, but if it was kerned at all, it doesn’t strike me as done right. It’s uneven, too loose, and frankly looking at the overall result makes me think some basement designer did this. Maybe I’ve become too OCD in my old age… lol.
I was staring at the logo the other day, and couldn’t help having a feeling of wrongness, I thought it was just the fact that it was a Microsoft product! Thanks for showing me it wasn’t just that ;o)
This makes the technology behind the brand too simplistic, kind of like generic Corn Flakes. It is a marketing competitors dream that would just remove the “indows ” part of the logo and just show “W8″ (wait) as a red flag (or a white flag) in this case that Microsoft is too far behind to catch up in anything and too slow to develop anything original. When I was there in 2008, I remember how cool and innovative Surface 1.0 was. I hear that surface 2.0 is out now in 2012. Maybe Microsoft will downsize enough (and replace the pirate Captain Ballmer) to be one day innovative and face-paced again. Maybe they can spend the remainder of their assets to buy out Area 51 technology from the 70′s to catch up.
Hi Graham, I think you have a good point.
Having thought about it, I think that the straight lines, with fixed width best represents the metro design style. Having the sense of perspective of a real life window looks equally appealing, but doesn’t represent the digital nature of metro. It would be a more physical representation of the Window. The designer makes the point above, I’m just basically agreeing with that.
Your logo would be a good choice too, but I think they’ve put a lot of thought behind the design, re-connecting classic Windows and metro.
#3. in the brief includes the phrase “Welcoming you in…” but it looks like the window is opening outwards. Considering that the “Windows 8″ is written on the right and that English is read from left to right. Just one more thing to be fussy about. :)
P.S The designers probably considered adding perspective to the window frames but after staring at your adjusted one for a while it starts to look to me like 4 separate rhombuses instead of one window.
Graham, I don’t think I could put it better myself, the lack of perspective in the window frames is certainly the sort of detail that’s simply too hard to miss even by an average designer, let alone the sort of branding identity studio that Microsoft would hire for this sort of project. When I first stumbled on this logo I assumed the image was somehow distorted, but interestingly enough this turn out to be the actual official version. Like you, I also feel something is not quite right with the window frames.
Hi, Graham. I’m not a designer and I cheerfully admit that your knowledge of this subject dwarfs mine. Having said that…speaking just as an average person looking rather naively at two versions of a logo, I find that your “corrected” version makes me feel instantly uncomfortable, in a way that the original version doesn’t. That wide gap you’ve introduced at the right, whatever its mathematical rigor, makes me feel as if the whole window is about to fly apart at any moment. Whereas the fixed-width version feels solidly anchored together.
If this were a real window set into a real wall, I’m sure its failure to obey the laws of perspective would have seemed equally disquieting to me. But I simply don’t carry that expectation of “reality” when looking at four perfectly uniformly-colored, two-dimensional panes floating against an empty white void which also seems to permeate the crossed lines that separate them. The artifice is already so apparent in this entire construct — in fact, I kind of suspect it’s the whole point — that while my eye does register the “wrong” detail, my mind accepts it in the same way it accepts, say, the fact that a cartoon character only has four fingers.
Gary Larson once told a story about people’s reaction to a “Far Side” comic of his that showed a group of penguins having a conversation on an ice floe, trying to figure out why all their friends kept disappearing one by one, while behind them lurked a hungry-looking polar bear disguised in a penguin suit. After this cartoon was published, several hundred people wrote Larson to point out that penguins and polar bears live at opposite poles of the Earth, and would never be found together on an ice floe in the first place. And yet, he noted, not a single person ever wrote him to point out that penguins can’t talk.
I think your analysis may contain a similar oversight.
The logo I was basing my thoughts on is not the correct logo, so I’m pretty sure it’s a mute point now anyway.
The official logo has pencil thin lines compared to the much thicker lines which had been showing up on the internet as well as being referenced by many other websites. Now that Pentagram explains the reasoning it certainly makes sense and creates less of this perspective issue that I talked about, but I still find fixed thickness lines very odd to look at in this scenario.
Too me these fixed thickness lines, or the classical art perspective, just look optically/visually odd.
I also agree with everything you say, and this is what confuses the hell out of me in this case. I can’t get that logo looking right regardless of if ithas increasing thickness lines to match the perspective, or they keep this classical style of perspective.
So to me the fact there is this slight confusion-which I know to be shared by a number of people-tells me that there is something all together “not right”, on a more fundamental level, with this logo. It leaves me quite unsettled that there is no, at least for my own personal viewpoint, way to make it seem “OK”.
I actually like the lack of perspective in the window crossbars. It turns the motif into something other than a boring ‘realistic’ window – creating instead a true graphic image that transcends the prescriptively mundane.
The ‘realistic’ perspective window crossbars look a bit ‘obvious’ in comparison to the crispness of the single width option adopted. Kudos to Windows for actually coming up with something that is so far removed from the awful Windows logos previously produced (in my opinion anyway) that it looks like a breath of fresh air!!
I also think the parallel non-perspective line will render better when produced at smaller sizes on screen – surely an important consideration.