Microsoft Uses a Thousand Words to Justify Some New Office Icons ⇥ microsoft.design

I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them.

Jeff Johnson, quoting me:

“So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good”

This *should* be the justification. In other words, you don’t really need to justify something that’s self-evidently good, only something that’s self-evidently bad. This is the problem — the badness of Liquid Glass — not the lack of justification.

I completely agree. My sentence continues “…self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same”. I wish it was obvious why this should be the case, not something that was preemptively defended.

Take, for example, this long article by Jon Friedman of Microsoft announcing the rollout of new application icons:

[…] That’s the paradigm shift; Microsoft 365 has always empowered productivity but the driving force of the UX was often app features or the tools themselves. Today, the driving force is the outcome you desire.

With that paradigm shift come significant changes to the UX discipline itself and how we approach product making. Longer cycles of heads-down development used to be followed by a big reveal of big changes. Today, with model capabilities rapidly emerging and our learning as UX practitioners rapidly advancing — including becoming more technical as a discipline — product evolution is happening in continuous waves. Research shows changes to iconography are almost always received as a signal for product changes and in an era of ongoing, smaller shifts, the icons should reflect that. As such, we embraced the idea of “evolution, not revolution” throughout our design process.

This try-hard justification made me think of Johnson’s post. It is over a thousand words and I do not believe I view these icons differently after finishing it. The new icons are fine — very Microsoft, in that the company has produced some spectacular-looking 3D renders and illustrations completely unrelated to the actual icons I will be seeing on my desktop when this update is released.