The year 1987 marked the introduction of Microsoft’s “Pac-Man” logo—and the shift towards using serif fonts in the company’s packaging. By 1993, the latter reached ridiculous proportions, as names of the products were stretched to more than a third of the box’s height. I thought it would be an interesting idea to recreate the old style with Microsoft’s recent product.
Instead of looking for the exact typeset and stretching it myself, I’ve traced the “pre-stretched” letters from Microsoft’s own materials and tweaked them when necessary. I aimed for the maximum authenticity, down to color of a marketing blurb. I couldn’t, however, find the exact font used in the tagline, but Plantin Italic proved to be a perfect substitute.
A modern Teams logo is already three-dimensional, by the nature of modern “post-reset” Office and Windows logo. The Visual C++ logo, being a precedent of using a 3D render, let me opt for a 3D model rather than a drawing or a stock photo. Noise and drop shadows were added to make the render look like the one from the 1990s. Hand-drawn details were added to add some expressiveness to the “T” plate.
