New golden Windows Live Hotmail logo unveiled

A recent behind-the-scenes video about the infrastructure of Windows Live Hotmail has let loose a new golden logo for Windows Live Hotmail presumably for the imminent Windows Live “Wave 4” refresh.

As straightforward as it might be, this logo actually comes at somewhat of a surprise to me since it contrasts with current text-based “Wave 3” Windows Live branding with a Windows logo, the name “Windows Live” and the name of the service affixed to the end wordmark.

This new branding not only puts more emphasis on Hotmail (and less on Windows Live) but also an unusually vibrant orange envelope icon, similar however not the same as the current Mail desktop client icon. As the Live branding up and until now has always been predominantly blue, this certainly stands out.

40 insightful thoughts

  1. Microsoft has really been talking a lot about Hotmail lately … hopefully they’ve got some great new upcoming features coming out soon!

  2. Wow! I love the new look. Bold and simple, reminds me a lot of Windows Phone 7. Can’t wait to see the rest of the icons for the whole Live set. It’s a shame the old ones will disappear into history though, they were a great design and looked even better when at there full “large” resolution.

  3. I wonder whether the orange is a coincidental or deliberate design decision to correspond with the Outlook icon (although this orange is warmer than the current Outlook 2010 beta icon). This colour also corresponds with the RSS icon, so are Microsoft using the colour orange to represent their mail products, or maybe it’s just a big coincidence.

  4. I wonder why they use Hotmail’s new logo (not unveiled), but don’t do the same with Outlook’s 2010 logo (unveiled).

  5. I like the flame/flare accent they came up with. The current Windows Live Mail is a tad pedestrian. I suspect the monochromatic-like theming probably will only touch Hotmail and not the other Windows Live services.

    1. “not the other Windows Live services”
      You may want to think about this more carefully and remember to take into account what they did last time they changed logos and such.

  6. It’s got the word “Hot” in its name, so it makes sense that the logo be predominantly in the yellow-orange-red part of the colour spectrum.

    Now if it were called Windows Live Coolmail…

  7. Does this really stand out? An orange icon? What about Bing and the new Office 2010 icon? They are orange too. I don’t see what Microsoft’s design department is trying here.

    Personally, I prefer the current style because it does look fresh and modern.

  8. personally i like the cool blue.
    however this probably has an aesthetic reason.
    for example, maybe on a field of visual icons, you need a simple logo which stands out. currently, hotmail does not seem to have its own pictorial symbol, just the word hotmail in a certain font.

    1. Nooooo….. or else once again we will have a nomenclature mess. the desktop client is currently called Windows Live Mail. It took them two “waves” to sort out that mess.

  9. Nice on design but poor on features. Hotmail is so miles behind Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Why can’t they add more features and more regularly when Outlook has it all? Btw Long pls bring back your webslice.

    1. The nww hotnail outlook really sucks. I have hard time deleting many msgs at ssme time and have to delete one msg at a time and very time consuming. I don’t even see all my contacts except few like less than 10. What happened to all my contscts that I had on hotmail. Bring bsck tge old hotmail causd outlook really sucks big time!!

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