Microsoft does have a huge issue with inconsistency, in both branding and product design.

While Andrew (the author) correctly identified an issue, his approach is deeply flawed. A Manifesto on Digital Style Andrews proposed Microsoft logo is bland, and is aesthetically inconsistent. Typography can be done well (as WP and Zune have shown), but he simply makes a poor choice in his font. Its not Segoe UI not a big deal as long as Microsofts modern branding extends that font change to everywhere Microsofts flagship font is found: Windows, Xbox, Office, Windows Phone, Bing everywhere. A lot of good design work went into Segoe to make sure that everything from the flags and the finials to the apexes and the angles matched up. This font maintains an awkward semblance of mixed-casing with the lack of a dot on the i' and the ambiguous casing of the other letters; few of them are definitively upper- or lower-case, which draws the eye unintentionally to the overtly rectangular i' and circular, inartistically-shaped o. Worst of all, I must say, are the finial and ascender of the t. Those angles! While every other letter maintains strictly orthogonal terminals, the t throws all convention to the wind and chooses not one, but two angles entirely for its own abuse. Not only are they not mutually parallel, but they dont match the angles introduced in the proposed logo, either! Positively horrendous.

Andrew realizes that the odd perspective thrown onto the new Window logo is visually uncomfortable, and proposes a replacement not only for Windows, but a design paradigm to be expanded to Surface and Office. The proposed Windows logo is too simple its merely a rotated parallelogram, with no defining features. Its a shape found in the simplest childrens toys and on your families refrigerators. Its not something that could ever become synonymous with Microsoft or Microsofts products. Andrew tries to creating a united branding within Microsoft products by remaking the logos into collections of these parallelograms, but the result is unintuitive, inconsistent, and no more unique than the original shape. Taking a look at the logo application section, the slash looks out-of-place, generic, and imbalanced on the Surface and the Lumia 800. Further, the Surface logo doesnt allude to a tablet/slate, the Windows logo trashes 25 years of cultural recognition, and the Office logo is some lovespawn of 80sretro and contemporary styles not that either has any place in digital design. Good design is classic; it doesnt allude to any particular time period, and requires only minimal modifications (shading and lighting effects, in this case) to be updated for the newest decade. Contrarily, retro is designed to look old-fashioned, and contemporary cool for a few months tops before some other design house comes along and decides that something else looks even cooler for the next wave of products. He suggests merging Windows Phone with the Surface for marketing branding. Absurdity, I call! Although they share the Windows Core and receive touch input, there is little similarity between the products, unlike Apples iPhone/iPad pairing (not that I am suggesting that Microsoft ought to have taken the mobile-OS-on-a-tablet route). By branding them both Surface, people will expect them to have similar functionalities and it simply devolves from there, as it is unreasonable to interact identically (or

even similarly, I would argue) with both a phone and a laptop(/tablet, as the Surface is designed to be both). Also, try saying I got a SurfacePhone! or Woo! SurfaceTablet! excitedly. You cant. Surface sounds cool, but not when appended with another word. Too many companies do this: they take ownership over a word or name, then abuse the crap out of it. Nokia appears to be doing it with the Lumia (610, 710, 800, 900; please choose a new name or drop the number!) and Microsoft squashed gaming and media (Zune) together as Xbox. The worst offender by far, however, is Samsung, and Galaxy (Galaxy, S, SII, SII Skyrocket, SIII, Nexus, Ace, Note, and Tab seriously, wtf). Also, why do the i's in Windows and Office get dotted, yet Microsofts doesnt? While Im on it, we need to discuss Metro. Since the advent of Windows 8s startscreen, people have misconstrued the design philosophy to mean large, flat, colored tiles everywhere. No, that aint it. Metro is a typography-centric set of design standards, with bold colors used to accent the content. Its about the intersection of functional (flat and typography-based) with attractive (white-space, bold color contrasts, consistency, and liveliness/animation). These new palates almost all fail the bold contrast test. Light grey on light grey and dark grey on dark grey are classic combinations, so those get a pass, but the acidic green on grey, white on sky blue, and navy on black all strain the eyes, either with the background-tile matchup (acid-grey and navy-black) or the text-tile combination (white-sky blue). Here is a really good slide deck from when Microsoft first introduced Metro. See how far (backward) its come? Notice how colors were used to accent text and icons they meant something, rather than the color-picker roulette from this post. Andrew - as well as Microsoft need to cement the associations between colors and destinations (functions), as thats what subways/undergrounds have done to ensure that you get the information you need from the quickest possible glance? The proposed billboards and bags are dangerously Apple-esque, and fit with neither the original Metro nor the proposed rebranding style. Naught but a symbol (again, completely meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the brand, painfully generic otherwise) and a name. The posters look pretty good - at least they contain images of actual products rather than a slash and a company name like the billboards but they look like something Casa de Jobs would put out. Microsofts, to truly embrace Metro, should at least say something about the product and its functionality rather than simply making a bold, qualitative statement.

Having thoroughly lambasted his work otherwise, Ill say that I do like his vision of the wallet hub for the most part. His odd mixing of text-casing conventions (First Letter Capitalized versus all lowercase versus ALL CAPITALIZED) aside, I think these display an attractive balance of text, color (though this depends ultimately on the card vendor), and logo. The font itself also has to change (its Calibri, rather than the Segoe UI (light) used throughout the rest of Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox), but this bit has potential.