Lipstick on a Pig (Premium)

No matter what you think of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 icons, they do nothing to solve any problems with those apps, the underlying system, or the massive design inconsistencies that are found all over this platform. This new design is, in fact, the most superficial change that Microsoft could possibly make, and rather than celebrate this inanity, we should be troubled by the arbitrary style of this new design, which inexplicably casts most icons as blue or orange. For some reason.

As I’ve noted many times, Microsoft has long used the phrase “lipstick on a pig” to describe the arbitrary design changes it’s made to its products so that you could tell one version from another. In the late 1990s and 2000s, for example, Microsoft would subtly change the look of the toolbars and then ribbons in Office for this very reason: A support person looking over the shoulder of a user could tell the version they were using at a glance, which could help them solve problems more quickly.

But this change is, in many ways, even more superficial.

To be clear, I’m not really opining on the quality of the redesigned icons; our reaction to such things is subjective, where some clearly love them and some don’t. My take is simply that Microsoft has chosen a curiously blue design for most of the new icons, and I don’t understand that. Choosing a single color---or two, since some are just as arbitrarily orange as most are arbitrarily blue---is a surefire way to alienate a huge chunk of your user base. That’s just dumb, and even people who like the new icons should understand that.

No, the problem is that Windows 10 was already an inconsistent mess from a user experience/user interface perspective. We could go on for days about why this is so, and we could describe the many examples. But if you look just at the icons we see in Windows 10, there are dozens of competing looks and styles. So by changing some small selection of icons to these new blue and orange versions, Microsoft has done almost nothing to move the needle on this issue. Talk about doing the minimum.

Think about Microsoft’s redesign of the Office application icons. In that case, each icon received a color that is associated with the brand of the app. Excel is green, Word is blue, and so on. (I’ve joked that Excel is green because of money, and that Word is blue because writers are depressive, but no matter.)

Now think about the redesign of some of the Windows 10 applications. In this case, most are blue, and some are orange. The color application is arbitrary. It’s also worse than the previous design, even if you were bored by black and white, because those icons at least made sense when the user switched between Dark and Light modes. These icons? They don’t change. They are actually less sophisticated.

If Microsoft really cared about good design and consistency, each icon would be colorful, with multiple colors, and none would have the same central color d...