Microsoft Introduces New and Improved OneDrive Experience for Web

Microsoft has today announced the release of a completely re-designed, responsive OneDrive web experience, which will be rolling out to all OneDrive users “over the next couple of days” and will arrive for OneDrive business users before the end of the year. Microsoft claims to have re-designed OneDrive for web from the ground up, including the visual grid, color palette, and typography. “In order to achieve a truly cohesive web experience across the breadth of devices people use to access OneDrive we had to start from scratch”, says Microsoft.

Grid

“When we began design work on the new web experience we could have just updated some colors, adjusted a few font sizes, and called it a day, but we knew that wouldn’t be enough”, notes the OneDrive team in the official press release. The all new OneDrive for web now has a 4-pixel grid, which Microsoft says offers flexibility in layout while still maintaining visual density and stability across both web and native layouts. “Every component was reworked to snap to the new visual and responsive grids – panels, dialogs, file list, left navigation, commanding, and even buttons”.

After the grid, the color palette came next. Our brand color is a well-established #234fa2, so we started there and worked up a full set of complimentary tonal grays with a few accents. We did a deep accessibility pass, made a few adjustments, and arrived at the color palette you see in the product today. It’s a well-balanced set of colors, that brings a refreshing, creative energy to the OneDrive UI.

Type is about clarity. Keeping it simple improves the way a design communicates. And one of the biggest goals we had when it came to our decisions around type was to create a more legible, readable, and clear experience that celebrates your content, not our UI. For web, we use Segoe, a custom type family that is the core visual identity element throughout Microsoft’s product ecosystem.

The OneDrive team also notes in the end that they aren’t finished yet, and that users should stay tuned for even more improvements to come.

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