What if Microsoft’s new logo style was applied to other famous brands?

Microsoft’s new logo, unveiled yesterday, is a bold departure from tradition because it’s the first to feature a visual symbol alongside the familiar wordmark. This sudden outburst of color from the typically staid company has inevitably stimulated designers’ imaginations, and one product from it has been a gallery posted on Tumblr showing what other famous brands would look like if they underwent the same minimalist treatment.

A clean sans-serif typeface is naturally used, as is the stripped-down, square aesthetic of Microsoft’s four-tile symbol. What results are some of the cleanest logos you’ll have seen in a long time, stretching from near perfection (the Pepsi designs retain the iconic brand feel while sacrificing little) to slightly absurd (Google’s logo is abstract enough to require a caption). The award for most-improved logo must clearly go to the London 2012 Olympics, but then again, just writing “London 2012 Olympics” in a generic font like Arial would constitute a better logo than what the actual Games had to put up with.