A concise design system for Microsoft’s flagship productivity tools.

The team at Ranger and Fox brought me onboard to help define the art direction and design system for the Microsoft 365 motion toolkit. Microsoft needed a design system to help them communicate the day-to-day capabilities of the 365 ecosystem across video, social media and beyond.

Taking cues from the existing 365 promotion videos (executed by Tendril, Buck and Foam), we developed the identity based upon the ideas of daylight and clarity. We utilized daylight lighting effects to give the animations and backdrops a clean, natural look whilst the Microsoft 365 logo can be cropped in a variety of ways to create shadows and depth across the system.

Underpinning the art direction was a solid foundation; a toolkit-able design system based upon a modular grid derived from the windows logo. Type can scale up or down according to the golden ratio while each app within the 365 ecosystem defines the colour values used for accents and supporting palettes.

Credits.