istartedsomething

Someone was a big fan of orange…

October 9th, 2007 AEST by Long Zheng
Jump to comments

Microsoft Forefront website

Manager: I want the website to stand out as much as possible. I’m a big fan of orange and robots.
Designer: Get this. First, the whole page is pure orange. Then a robot will appear, but not for long. It will then fade to reveal more orange. My inspiration is the sun.
Manager: Is your last name da Vinci cause that’s brilliant! Implement it right away.


23 Comments

  1. Milan

    brilliant xD

  2. Christopher Hawkins

    You make an excellent point.

  3. PocketKocurek

    Holy Haruhi… O_o, theres so many good designers on deviantart ie. and they spend money on somethin like that! ARGH!

  4. Raiker

    Valve`s propagation :p

  5. Jason Cox

    The new Microsoft Orange Box, only for Exchange Server 2007.

  6. Craig Bailey

    You crack me up!
    I wonder why they didn’t try something brown… oh yes, already did that with a Mac product :-)

  7. Steev Bawllmr

    Yay, orange!
    Me gusta mucho la naranja! (that was propably wrong, wasn’t it?)
    anyhooo, purdy kewl.

  8. tino

    The Forefront homepage is one of the best flash sites from Microsoft.

  9. Michael Mc

    I think it’s quite nice…

  10. anonymous

    MS designers have a lot more to learn about design. Whatever good designs/logos/eye candy we see in MS products is all “hired”. Most, but not all in house design sucks.

  11. Andre Da Costa

    If you are CIO buying ForeFront for your IT infrastructure, I think the last thing you are gonna care about is the color of the product page. :s

    In fact, I think orange puts emphasis on the content instead of the page itself, the first thing I recognized when I saw the screen shot is the brand name. Next the Robot, and text: “destroying evil robots: easy, destroying worms: easier”. Instantly, I am curious to find out what it does, so my mind is not focusing on the aesthetics, but the information on the page which is security.

    Result: success

  12. Alex

    I think you are complaining a tad much there Long… Not enough colorful bunnies for ya? :P

  13. Long Zheng

    @Andre Da Costa: It didn’t hurt your eyes?

  14. Zim

    If you turn off the red on your monitor, the site color turns green. And that’s better for the environment.

  15. Mack D. Male

    lol priceless…this is why I subscribe to your blog haha, the hidden gems!

  16. Andre Da Costa

    No long, it does not. If the entire page was just orange, it probably would. But there is a combination of elements to avoid this, the Robot silhouette, the white text and feature modules. There is contrast, which makes the page ok.

  17. David Burela

    Well we’re rolling forefront out to all of our casino’s and properties here over the next fortnight
    The orange didn’t slow us down ;-)

  18. xaml

    So there’s people nitpicking about every last little thing micro soft.

  19. Traume

    Maybe someone graduated from the University of Tennessee… “Go Big Orange!”

  20. Kenneth

    Perhaps the designer is from Holland? :)

  21. Angry

    At least it’s not that anemic Vista Aurora crap that can’t be changed.

Leave a Reply