Little bit of appreciation for good design— despite an underwhelming set of new features, Microsoft‘s Office 2000 has got some damn cool icons.

They’re almost childlike in their simplicity, they’re extremely distinct from one another, even at very low resolutions, and they only use a few colors. Obviously, the whole design is very web-savvy. Interesting that one of the industry pundits said (derisively) that they looked as if they had been drawn with a crayon… I took that as a compliment to the designers.

Here’s a sampling:

My favorite of all of these is Outlook. Besides being a kind of neat program with a horrible interface, the small icon for the program evokes not just the "clock" element of the product’s time-management features, but also consists of an O and an L. OL = Outlook. Cool!