To the surprise of many, it has been confirmed that the new Windows 8 logo will be the flat monochrome one that has been knocking around the interwebs for the last few weeks. Many people assumed that it was a fake because they either thought that Microsoft would never do something so daring or so stupid, depending on which side of the disbelief fence you were on.

The response to the logo has been quite mixed. Tony Bradley, PCWorld, described it as “Pure Genius”. Sean Ludwig of Venturebeat said “looks like it was created in MS Paint”.

Personally, I like it. It is strong, confident and distinctive. I am presuming we will see treatments of it in colors other than the cyan blue that is used on the Nokia Lumia 800!

Like Paul Thurrot, I think people will probably get used to it pretty quickly.

This image from the Windows team blog nicely shows the evolution of the Windows logo.  The blog post includes a discussion of each evolution of the logo.

There has been a trend in logo and UI design for a while now to flatness. All the shiny embossed and bevelled logos and UI’s of the noughties are disappearing. An excellent example of this flatness can be seen in the Metro UI currently available in Windows Phone 7+ and soon to be embedded in Windows 8.

Of course, at BrightWork, we got on the flatness train early!

Old BrightWork Logo (introduced 2003)

Current BrightWork Logo (introduced early 2011)