The making of the PowerPivot icon
It was a privilege to be part of the team for Microsoft® PowerPivot, a new product that will change business intelligence by empowering information workers with the ability to conduct ad-hoc data analysis on massive amounts of data.
I’m going to tell you a tiny part of the PowerPivot story which is how the product icon came to be.
A few weeks before the deadline for CTP2 I was asked to create a product icon for PowerPivot — sooner rather than later.
Here is what we thought… in the end :-)
- It needed to look like it could comfortably sit with the Office family of icons. (They changed them for Office 2010 but not too much.)
- We couldn’t really abandon the legacy imagery of SQL Analysis Services, nor would we want to.
- We wanted to portray the idea of the two windows that people would use with PowerPivot and Excel.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First we started with these sketches:
