How Microsoft uses Segoe can determine its personality. Of course, there is more to a visual brand than the typeface. And to most viewers, Myriad and Segoe are essentially the same thing.

(Adobe also uses Myriad quite often, although a new identity face was announced in 2009.) There are signs that Myriad is growing stale in Cupertino – Helvetica is gradually becoming Apple’s first choice on the screens of its devices, and we could see it replace Myriad in their marketing as well – but for now, it is clearly the face of Apple. Over ten years ago, Apple shifted away from its condensed ITC Garamond to Myriad, Robert Slimbach’s interpretation of the Frutiger model.

A similar cloud of uniformity has now descended over the landscape of mainstream technology, which is now a field of brands set in Humanist type.

Last year, Sam Berlow noticed how a trip through the mall has become a monotonous typographic experience. The problem with the new Microsoft logo isn’t really that Segoe is an unoriginal typeface, it’s that Segoe makes for an unoriginal identity. It doesn’t force itself into Frutiger’s metrics (letter widths and spacing) and designer Steve Matteson incorporated changes that – especially in the UI and WP variations – make sense for their intended use. But whatever the legal and ethical considerations, I have more respect for Segoe as a design than Arial. Perhaps it’s a hair-splitting rebuttal, but Segoe is not a Microsoft design or commission – it was an existing Monotype typeface that Microsoft licensed. Some (including the European Union) say Segoe is too similar to Frutiger, earning it the same derision that Arial gets for its similarity to Helvetica: Microsoft’s poor replication of a typeface they didn’t want to pay for. Segoe is a typeface that is clearly inspired by Adrian Frutiger’s landmark 1975 design for the Charles de Gaulle Airport signage. It’s built around a simple layout of “tiles” and the Segoe WP typeface. Microsoft Windows 8 represents a dramatic change from previous Windows versions. These are the most common typefaces in the database, but there are many more.

Microsoft edge logo evolution