Exploring a future design language

I was brought in to help Microsoft teams explore modern visual styles for their products, ensuring alignment with central design systems while giving each application a distinct personality. Over a six-month engagement, I collaborated with these teams to shape tailored and impactful visual identities for key productivity tools across the broader suite.

I worked specifically with the team dedicated to SharePoint. Over the course of the project, I generated hundreds of mockups, motion studies, and diagrams in collaboration with other senior designers and leadership to demonstrate the viability of a refreshed visual language.

This project underscored the value of design not only as a problem-solving tool but also as a critical participant in organizational communication and planning. I saw firsthand how design exploration sustains conversations about the future of products and experiences. By adapting my approach and embracing creative flexibility, I contributed to a vision that highlights the importance of design as both an artistic and strategic practice.

Project Purpose

The teams I collaborated with at Microsoft were at a pivotal moment in an evolving conversation about visual personality in their products within the context of company-wide design systems. This gave the SharePoint team a rare opportunity to reimagine the product's visual identity as a ubiquitous organizational communication tool in its second decade of production.

Success for this initiative meant demonstrating broad exploration within the boundaries of careful thought, requiring multiple teams to simultaneously explore bold deviations and find common ground.

Setting the Stage for Exploration

This project provided an important opportunity for me to critically evaluate how I balance structure and fluidity in my design work. Especially as my work has trended away from brand identity development toward product design, I have come to view designers as engineering counterparts, focusing on empowering end-users to achieve specific and measurable goals. However, this initiative was intentionally open-ended to allow for broad, conceptual exploration.

Widening My Inspiration Lens

Typically, I rely on predefined user goals to generate multiple design hypotheses, each resulting in distinct interactive or stylistic design concepts. As that type of structure wasn't available on an exploratory project like this, one of the ways I adapted was by revisiting my collection of typography books focused on artistic expression in printed media. These reminded me of the profound impact a designer can have on perception and hierarchy through typographic rhythm, variation, and patterning.

This approach enabled me to pursue a wide breadth of exploration avenues to improve digital experiences without altering interaction features, workflows, or paradigms.

This approach resonated with my team by illustrating value without infringing on the domain of user experience teams, who would join the project at a later stage.

Creating Structure Through Writing

I often turn to writing as a tool to create structure and direction in my design process. Writing, as a linear expression of information, shifts my mindset in ways that unlock realizations or prompt questions that can be difficult to articulate visually.

For me, writing and design share many processes and objectives, so writing about a design problem can help uncover insights that might otherwise remain hidden. In this project, writing also served as a mechanism to create continuity through design explorations. In the absence of formal requirements, I relied on capturing feedback in writing to create a framework for guiding design iterations.

Orienting Through Collaboration

After individual product teams explored visual identities for their respective applications, I joined representatives from the OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint groups for a two-week design sprint. This event included extensive sharing, critique, and discussion of shared design principles and their implementation within core Microsoft productivity tools.

I've found that generative design, as it progresses in unpredictable ways that can’t always be quantified or explained, benefits from the sense of camaraderie that comes along with group work.

Sharing and discussing our creative work allowed me to spot areas of alignment with other designers. The experience created a sense of grounding and collaborative orientation toward a common goal, even if that goal wasn’t always concrete.

It was rewarding to see elements of my own work borrowed by other designers and to incorporate their ideas into my explorations.