Microsoft, kalmstrom.com And Logos - A Fascinating Coincidence

Yesterday Microsoft released their new logo, and it came as a surprise for the kalmstrom.com team that its symbol was so alike to our own square logo – which was created after Microsoft had complained about the earlier kalmstrom.com logo!

Building on top of Microsoft
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions builds applications on top of Microsoft’s most popular programs, like Outlook, Excel and SharePoint. They make Microsoft do more, and of course we want that to be visible in our logo. In our rectangular logo we show it with text – leveraging your Microsoft – but sometimes a square logo is needed and then it is more difficult.

Mix of icons
Our first square logo was a mix of icons that looked like the icons of Microsoft products used by the kalmstrom.com applications. However, Microsoft would not accept that logo in their prestigious Pinpoint marketplace, because it resembled their own icons too much. Pinpoint is an important marketing channel for us, where the company as well as our products and services can be extensively presented, so we did not argue but decided to change our square logo.

New square logo
Siret Kalmstrom, Sales and Relations Manager, suggested we should keep the globe from the earlier logo and add a banner to it. This shows that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has customers all over the world.

 Our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza suggested Windows look-alike colors as background to the globe, and from those two ideas our Graphic Designer Jitendra Joshi created the new square logo you see here. We were all satisfied with the background of four tiles, partly hidden by the globe with the kalmstrom.com banner, and the new logo was launced in December 2011.

From waves to tiles
At the time when the kalmstrom.com square logo was created, the Windows logo had a bent, wavy style, like a flag. In different shapes had been there ever since the launch of Windows 3.1 in 1992. We had no idea that Microsoft was planning to get rid of these colors in the Windows 8 logo, neither that they instead would use the same colors in their logotype  – but now as tiles.

We got a first glimps of Microsoft’s minimalistic new style in February, when they introduced their two-dimensional Metro-style Windows flag, and now we see the same very simple style in the new company logo that reminds of the Windows 8 interface. Microsoft presents their new look in a YouTube video, that already has a lot of comments.

What do you think about the Microsoft and kalmstrom.com logos? Personally I like the kalmstrom.com logo better, but it is really nice to see that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions once again stands in the frontline – this time even ahead of Microsoft!