These are the Office icons rejected by Microsoft

Microsoft is rolling out new curved and colorful Office icons, and is now revealing a set of design concepts it experimented with before finalizing these new icons. Some concepts are radically different from those offered by Microsoft, with design explorations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that more closely resemble Office for Mac icons of the past.

Word’s conceptual icons (above) include a notebook-like experience and different ways to visualize stacks of paper or documents. Microsoft has experimented with making Word lettering the key element of the icon, as well as versions in which the lettering blends in or is absent entirely. Microsoft ultimately opted for a design with three horizontal bars instead of four, and uses versions of the icon with and without lettering.

Microsoft focuses heavily on the use of cells in its existing and new Excel icons, and the concepts rarely deviate from this. I really like the X icon, but the rest looks like what Microsoft landed on for the final icon.

PowerPoint has always been about slides, and Microsoft has been experimenting with various ways to visualize that for its latest PowerPoint icon. A few concepts focus on lettering, morphing into a ribbon-like P or a letter P with a circular diagram hanging from it. The final icon design is much more subdued, however, with a slightly more rounded and colorful version of the current PowerPoint icon.

All of Microsoft’s new Office icons, including new Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and OneNote designs, are now starting to roll out to Windows and iOS. Microsoft seems to use the lettered versions in Windows, but for iOS it opts for icons without distinctive letters.

What do you think? Are there any concept versions that you prefer over the final designs chosen by Microsoft?