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Twelve years of curiosity, experimentation, and community, expressed in a single form.
To celebrate the 12th anniversary of the Windows Insider Program, the Windows design team created a new wallpaper collection built around the number 12. Their colors range from bold black and white to highly saturated purple, orange, and green. Inspired by the minimal, dark visual language of the latest Surface devices, the composition translates their sense of precision and high performance into an abstract anniversary mark.
The result honors the Insiders, the early adopters, who explore what’s next, share feedback, and help shape Windows into what it is today.
Download them here: https://lnkd.in/eJRdGcye
On first look, Qian Jiang’s Designing humanity in the intelligence age is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to design intelligent systems that protect attention, preserve human agency, and ultimately improve the quality of human thought.
Watch the full tutorial here: https://lnkd.in/gSxdw6FM
AI may make research faster. That does not mean it makes the work lighter.
In the latest episode of Think First, Reeta Banerjee, Principal UX Researcher at Microsoft AI, and M.J. Kwak, MBA, AI Experience Architect at XSD Studio, unpack the cognitive load of learning new tools, checking the machine’s work and navigating expectations that have accelerated faster than the technology itself.
The question is not simply how much time AI saves. It is who claims that time, what fills it next and whether researchers are given the space to turn speed into better decisions.
Watch us work: This is how we design.
We’re hyped to announce a new video tutorial section added to the Microsoft Design site. The videos take you inside how we work, how we think, and how we’re approaching the design of intelligent experiences.
Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gwBPJxyJ
From the very beginning, this project felt groundbreaking. The goal and the colossal challenge were to translate the handwriting of the maestro Michelangelo Buonarroti into a typeface. It felt bold, perhaps even a bit brazen.
We believed getting closer to Michelangelo's story would help us create a work of value - not just a copy of his handwriting, but a rendition of his style. Thanks to the Fabbrica di San Pietro, we were able to enter the old master's private world: letters, sketches, and signatures. We came to know Michelangelo - the eccentric artist who loved solitude and spent hours writing. He was present in his letters; their calligraphy primarily inspired the lowercase characters.
For the uppercase, we had to look up - literally - to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, with its Roman letters designed by Michelangelo, and then we took inspiration from the Pietà - whose ribbon bears Michelangelo’s rare inscription.
We had all the pieces. We brought them together and transformed them into a consistent typeface. With the support of Microsoft, we tested every glyph, metric, and special character in a technical environment, verifying Michelangelus as a font that meets the standards of a wide range of applications - first and foremost, as a system font for Microsoft Office.
Today, we feel moved, proud, and a bit overwhelmed - in the best possible sense - by what we have created over these years, accompanied and assisted by our partners, the Fabbrica di San Pietro and Microsoft. We reached the goal together - an alphabet, a universal, digital language that everyone can use to give shape to their thoughts through writing, with Michelangelo looking on from the wings.
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What if you had the handwritten manuscripts and artwork of Michelangelo as raw material? How would you use it to design a contemporary typeface without just transcribing his penmanship into a font?
Introducing Michelangelus, a new serif typeface! Inspired by the hands that painted the Sistine Chapel, these letterforms invoke a sense of balance and space with wide curved contours contrasting angular shapes, and gestural ends.
Designed by the creative agency Studiogusto, the typeface was commissioned by the Fabbrica di San Pietro to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the consecration of St. Peter’s Basilica, known for its iconic dome, and designed by the one and only Michelangelo.
Our very own Si Daniels takes you on a journey through the designing of Michelangelus: https://lnkd.in/gH-2NmPN
As we rebuilt Copilot for work, we wanted the identity to reflect what makes Copilot valuable in the first place: bringing your apps, tools, and context together to help you get work done.
The result is a simple, elevated and recognizable expression.
Take a behind-the-scenes look at the new Copilot identity.
What if an icon could join the conversation?
As Copilot evolves, its new icon had to do more than brand and communicate presence. Its new mark had to help people understand what happens between entering a prompt and receiving a response. To do that, we employed color and motion to signal when Copilot is thinking, planning, or retrieving context.
Go behind the design of an identity built to communicate
➡️ https://lnkd.in/em6Ajx-t
AI can give a junior researcher a 24/7 mentor. It can help a senior researcher move faster. What it cannot do is manufacture the judgement that comes from years of building products with real people.
In the latest Think First, Peter Alderks, Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft; Isis Chen, Ph.D., UX Researcher on the Xbox Research team; and Hilary Dwyer, PhD, Principal UX Researcher, explore how AI is reshaping research across career stages.
Their conclusion is that while fluency is quick to acquire; experience is not. AI can accelerate learning, but knowing which questions to ask, when an answer is wrong and what actually matters still takes time.
Can synthetic users help researchers move faster without losing sight of the humans they are meant to understand?
In the latest episode of Think First, Microsoft researchers Mike Brzozowski, Zachary Spolar and Connor Joyce take on one of UX research’s most divisive questions. They disagree on how far synthetic users and synthetic data can go but converge on a crucial point: simulation can help teams test, narrow and sharpen ideas — it cannot reproduce the surprise, nuance or lived experience of a real person.
