Microsoft squares off with new logo

Microsoft has a brand new logo to go with all its brand spankin' new products.

The new design uses the long-standing Windows logo as its starting point, but gone are the wavy edges of that older look. The graphic element of the new logo is one squared-away image; the colours remain the same, and in the same order, but now they're enclosed in a square box. Equilateral sides, 90-degree angles, ta-da!

Overall, the updated logo is both the colourful graphic at the left and the newly re-fonted "Microsoft" to the right.

The change isn't coming at any old time for Microsoft. The company has a serious spate of major product releases coming up, including Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet — "one of the most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft's history", the company said in a blog post:

It's been 25 years since we've updated the Microsoft logo, and now is the perfect time for a change. This is an incredibly exciting year for Microsoft as we prepare to release new versions of nearly all of our products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, you will see a common look and feel across these products, providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs. This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of our most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft, so our logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning.

It's surely not a coincidence that the new Microsoft logo has the same sort of tiled look (formerly known as the Metro style) that characterises Windows Phone and Windows 8.

The new logo is already appearing at three Microsoft retail stores: in Seattle's University Village; in Bellevue, Washington; and in Boston, Massachusetts, where CNET's Jim Kerstetter got some snapshots of it yesterday. It'll appear in other stores over the next few months, and in the company's television ads globally. It will also, of course, grace Microsoft.com.

The old logo may linger in some places for a while. "Fully implementing a change like this takes time," the company said.

For you font fanatics out there, the lettering in the "Microsoft" portion of the new logo (see the video below) is known as Segoe.

Via CNET.com