This image claiming that Microsoft ripped off its new logo from Apple is pretty funny, but is its creator, Andrew Brett Watson, really being fair? Check it out in full below:
Watson claims to be a trained graphic designer, but he doesn’t seem to really know much about fonts. In my opinion, the logic here is a little bit rich: the font that Microsoft uses is called Segoe, which Microsoft first registered and has been using since 2004. They’ve been using it extensively for years.
Watson claims that Microsoft “ripped” off the design of Myriad Pro for the font, but that’s silly. The reason they both look so similar? They’re both the same “type” of font: they’re both sans serif (or “without feet” at the end of each letter’s strokes) and they’re both from the Humanist family of typefaces. Just like loads of other fonts, like Gill Sans and Optima.
Fonts from the same family tend to look pretty similar except for a few individual letters; pointing out those differences as being attempts to cover up a rip-off is pretty silly.
What do you think?
Source: Andrew Brett Watson
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
16 responses to “Did Microsoft Shamelessly Rip Off Apple When Designing Their New Logo?”
I like how you didn’t mention the other part of the logo, being the entire logo. “The words look the same, it’s obviously a copy!” Pfft… If it was a copy they would have put an apple there, not to mention that Microsoft technically created the first tablet PC and therefore Apple “Ripped off” their idea so-to-speak.