I really like the new sexy design of MSDN and Visual Studio, both colors and form. The new logo suggests me that now Visual Studio is not a tool that roughly integrates separate development assets but rather a really integrated and uniform development tool for .NET. There are places where the logo is very impressive and looks really great, let me show a few:
However, the nice Möbius strip does not look nice on the Windows 7 taskbar:
Compared to the light shape of the Visual Studio 2008 icon, the new one is modest, but the biggest issue is that you can hardly recognize it is there. The situation is a bit better when VS 2010 is started, the lighter background helps a bit:
However, when you compare it to the VS 2008 icon, you can see, it is far away from being great and highlighted.
I would not say that this logo intentionally is bad from accessibility point of view, I rather suspect, the designer (or anyone else) never tried it using over a dark background like the Windows 7 taskbar. I’m not a designer or a UX person, but I guess adding a white border around the icon would help a lot.
Posted
Oct 22 2009, 10:59 PM
by
inovak