The unspoken rule is: when Microsoft releases a new Office suite, our DevExpress designers draw a new set of skins to emulate the fresh Office appearance. We promised in our 2018 roadmap that we would deliver a vector-based Office inspired skin, to follow on from The Bezier, the latest application skin we released.
However, things turned out to be more complicated than that, since the newest Office 2019 versions are still in active development at this time. This means we can’t deliver on our promise for our v18.1 release, though of course we will try for v18.2.
Meanwhile, we wanted to have something to offer to those of you who need an Office-inspired vector skin. We considered porting the existing raster skins to SVG, but that seemed a daunting amount of work with limited future perspective. In the end we decided to create four color swatches on the basis of The Bezier to emulate the appearance of Office 2016: Office Colorful, Office Black, Office Dark Gray and Office White. From a designer’s perspective, there are differences between the swatches and a complete skin, but they certainly are difficult to find! The palette colors and the general mood of the swatches mirrors the Office appearance quite precisely, so that most end users will probably not notice any difference.
Those of you who wish to migrate to sleek, light-weight and high-DPI-friendly vector skins can do that now and benefit from a refreshed Office-like appearance. On our end, we are looking forward to the upcoming Office 2019 release and we will celebrate it with a truly new vector skin as soon as possible!
Please let us know your thoughts when you try the new color swatches!
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