Did Microsoft Shamelessly Rip Off Apple When Designing Their New Logo?

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0815.Microsoft_Logo_breakdown-for-screen

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

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