Microsoft Design

Microsoft AI is a Site of the Day winner🥇

The MAI team, together with partners at .studio, created a site that imagines AI as a bridge to deeper understanding and meaningful human connection ♾️

Rooted in trust and humanity, the experience shows how thoughtful design can shape inclusive, connected futures 🌎

Explore the site at the 🔗 in bio!

The new UI for Enterprise AI brings human-centered simplicity to business tools. Where icons signal intelligence, motion builds trust, and AI enhances every workflow ♾️

See how we’re evolving the design language that connects Microsoft 365, Copilot, and business apps 📲

Read the full story at the link in bio 🔗

Here’s a look at the branding behind Design Week 2025 🎨

Centered on this year’s theme, Breaking Boundaries, the system draws from Microsoft’s design heritage—merging past icons and future forms to capture where creativity has been and where it’s going next ⚡️

A celebration of 50 years of design, and the people who make it possible ❤️

Icons carry meaning far beyond their size. They introduce our products, set the tone for interaction, and build familiarity over time.

The refreshed Microsoft 365 icons represent more than a style change; they signal a new approach to design in an era shaped by AI. With Copilot as inspiration, they reflect how people and technology can grow and adapt together 🔁

Read the full story at the link in our profile 🔗

Some behind the scenes moments from our refreshed icons 🎨

Early looks at how the Word, PowerPoint, and Excel icons came to life 👀

Ever used the phoenix emoji in ? Check out this behind the scenes from showing how he went about creating it 🤩

Programs used: and

From asking if a horse gallops with all four hooves off the ground to co-creating with artificial intelligence, creative processes have certainly come a long way. When our Visual Design team was tasked with producing an ad for Surface for Business in just one month, they turned to AI—not just as a tool for efficiency, but to rethink 🧠 storytelling. 

With limited time and resources, AI became an essential part of the creative process. It helped rapidly visualize concepts, refine storyboards, and generate dynamic backgrounds that would have been costly or logistically complex to produce traditionally. The team spent weeks iterating on AI-generated imagery, chiseling away at prompts to bring their vision to life. While intricate motion shots were still filmed live, AI seamlessly blended with traditional production techniques to expand creative possibilities. 

Today on , dive into the team’s journey working creatively with AI and insights found along the way.  

🔗 in bio

In the fall of 2001, we created a wallpaper that history would remember as a defining image for early 2000s computing—“Bliss” 😌. Bliss’s rolling hills and simple composition served as an iconic backdrop for Windows as designers at Microsoft began to develop user experiences (while bringing along our beloved Clippy😉) that would come to define Microsoft throughout the decade 🖥️. As we near our 50th anniversary in 2025, our designers are starting to look back at 50 years of design, beginning with wallpapers like Bliss, exploring how we can evolve the landscape scene with our current and future theming expression.

For our latest pack of wallpapers 🖼️ from Microsoft Design, “Horizons,” five artists at Microsoft reflected on what it means to imagine a future landscape to serve as a backdrop as we approach the dawn of the next age of computing.

In our featured wallpaper for this month, the design blends elements of nature and fantasy, inspired by the organic architecture movement, evoking a sense of serenity and creativity. The artwork symbolizes how our designers are envisioning the future—where natural and digital worlds intersect 🪢.

Download our featured wallpaper on Design Milk and explore the full collection on our website via the 🔗 in bio.

P.S. Stay tuned as we explore more of 50 years of Microsoft Design in 2025 👀

There’s a new font in town 👀! You may remember back in 2021 when we invited you all to help choose our new default font—well, after 15 years, our default font is finally being replaced by a new font called (FKA Bierstadt) ––and the story of its creation is an awesome one. Inspired by a coastal town in California, Aptos is a meeting of old and new with hand-drawn characters brought to life by the latest variable typography technology.

It’s a sans serif design that lies mid-way between the humanist and geometric sans serif style. Commonly known as the Swiss style, Aptos letter forms consists of shapes that are bold, well-defined, directive, yet constrained at the same time. It’s full of clean-cut stem ends and subtle circular squares that allow for higher legibility at varying optical sizes.

To create the font, we worked with type designer, Steve Matteson (he’s been involved in the development of legendary fonts from Times New Roman to our own Segoe) and typographic engineers inside and outside of Microsoft. While Aptos is a sans serif font (shipping with 28 styles), we’re also releasing 🥁🥁🥁 a companion serif and monospaced designs—a first for Microsoft.

Learn more about Aptos at ➡️ https://msft.it/6172gFdZn and keep an eye out for Aptos in your font selector soon 👀.

A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has arrived Introducing Aptos, our modern successor to Calibri

Today we're unveiling an all-new website for as we roll out the next generation of Fluent, aka Fluent 2! With the launch of this site, we're excited to begin sharing tools for building seamless Fluent experiences on Web, iOS, and Windows. We'll regularly add new platforms, new components, new guidance, and more. Check in often to see what we're up to!

With our principle of designing in the open, we'd love to know what you think. Let us know which platforms, patterns, and components you're looking forward to most.

Head to msft.it/6003gbfzb to start exploring.

🎨: Wes Cocx

Fluent 2 Design System Explore the next evolution of Microsoft’s design system, enabling more seamless collaboration and creativity than ever. Move fluidly from design to development, between apps, and across platforms.

Learn more: https://msft.it/6000gpNIp

How do you reimagine visualizations for the cloud 🤔 — an intangible concept for many people — and for brands within one of the most ubiquitous brands on the planet? These are the kind of questions our design team asked when refreshing imagery for the cloud in a new event branding system 🤩...To do so the team focused on the behaviors of the cloud and key cloud descriptions and associations like “adaptive intelligence”, “insight”, “vibrant”, “sophistication”, and “dimensional”.

The end result? An intelligent ribbon 🎗️ with different petals connected but distinctive like the solution areas and synergistic relationships found within the cloud platform. Visit → https://msft.it/6000gpNIp to learn more about the design process and considerations 🤩.

Visualizing the Cloud How we crafted a bespoke visual identity for our cloud platforms and services