![]() ![]() As each icon gets finalized and hard-coded into our different products, you’ll be able to tell that Blend and Code are both Visual Studio products, but are not the same thing. But instead of having to remember which icon is Visual Studio Code and which icon is Visual Studio Team Services based solely on color, each product icon now includes a unique pictogram that captures the individual flavor of each product. The stylized border in the refreshed Visual Studio IDE icon is used in our other updated product icons as well. You’ll absolutely know what to expect when you click on it. In a lighter hue and with a stylized border, it represents our main IDE. In its classic dark purple, it now represents the whole Visual Studio family of products. As I mentioned earlier, the purple infinity symbol is still around. This familiar feeling is hard to pin down, but it’s essential. Most importantly, this new icon set has the familiar feeling of a Microsoft product family that’s part of the existing Microsoft brand. Within these constraints and with the objective of building a whole icon set that conveys a sense of family, I’m quite proud of what our designers have accomplished. It wasn’t an easy task, even for some of the best artists and designers in the industry. Each new icon had to follow all these rules, using only one color, straight lines, ribbon folds for all corners, and trying to retain a thin vertical line on the left and a thick vertical line on the right. Finally, one of the most crucial directives our designers had was to follow was to use only a single flat color for each icon. It’s got a thin vertical line on the left and a thick vertical line on the right, and the shape as a whole is made entirely of straight lines and strong angles that could be created by folding a ribbon. Deconstructing the infinity shape, it fits onto an underlying grid with two-point perspective. To achieve this, the new icon set needed to be in the same style as the existing infinity shape. ![]() Because the infinity shape has such strong brand recognition in the developer space, we wanted the new icons to look and feel as if they were an extension of that brand. We faced several challenges designing this new icon set. They have to effectively communicate to a worldwide audience. Icons for a major product family like Visual Studio should be visually attractive, but the requirements don’t stop there. We had a friendly competition among multiple design teams across three continents working on and iterating different concepts for the icon set. So we literally went back to the drawing board, if you’ll forgive the pun. That got confusing for us, which meant it had to be confusing for you. Even our own designers couldn’t always tell you which blue was which, and why. For example, we had light blue icons for both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Team Services. ![]() One of the problems our users have brought up for some time is not being able to tell different versions of Visual Studio products apart. The family also includes a macOS-style icon for Visual Studio for Mac, and a new icon for Visual Studio Code that will be revealed soon.īut the infinity symbol by itself isn’t enough. That includes our flagship Visual Studio IDE, Visual Studio Team Services, Blend for Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Mobile Center. But you might say it’s gotten a promotion of sorts: the purple infinity by itself now represents the entire suite of products you’ve come to rely on. The classic purple infinity shape that you already know and recognize is sticking around. ![]() We’ve started rolling out a new series of icons to represent the Visual Studio product family. Some icons even establish an emotional connection: they make you feel something about something. They offer clues as to what kind of experience you’ll have with the application the icon represents. They pack a lot of meaning into a small space. For pictures that are at most just under a centimeter wide on a normal display (or under half an inch, for those of you who aren’t British like me), icons are huge. Developers like you live with the Visual Studio icons every day: clicking on them multiple times, staring at them side by side on the taskbar, and seeing them attached to project files. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |