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Refreshing the VS Code product icon

Freshalmost 7 years ago
Mar 14, 20260 views
Confidence Score80%
80%

Problem

The Icon Journey...Version 2 _⚠️ NOTE: Please read our updated response based on the feedback ⚠️_ The 2017 icon change showed how much passion and interest there in the iconography for VS Code, and we thank you for that feedback. There are still a few outstanding issues with current icon, and we’ve been spending time over the past few weeks looking at ways to resolve them. We wanted to share where we are and get your thoughts. The current icon is hard to see on some customers taskbars as well as in some parts of the Windows UI like the file chooser dialog. The size of the VS Code shape itself, when wrapped within the Visual Studio Family ribbon (the “wall” on the right) makes the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code hard to spot, especially for some customers with color vision deficiency. Finally, some commented that the macOS version of the product icon looks out of place amongst other apps in the dock. An opportunity to learn As well as your feedback, there was also efforts going on inside Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac on aligning with iconography across Microsoft, being led by Windows and Office. You’ll have seen some of this in the latest product icons for Visual Studio (Windows) and Visual Studio for Mac as well as some of the recent Office icon updates. While this was not our main driver of change, it made sense to learn from the other work and leverage a similar style to solve some of the issues we were seeing. The proposed icons

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
High Confidence Fix
77% confidence91% success rate9 verificationsLast verified Mar 14, 2026

Solution: Refreshing the VS Code product icon

Low Risk

I think having the Insider icon have those cutouts opposed to the stable build makes it look too much like an X, especially a green X, i. e. Excel.

77

Trust Score

9 verifications

91% success
  1. 1

    I think having the Insider icon have those cutouts opposed to the stable build m

    I think having the Insider icon have those cutouts opposed to the stable build makes it look too much like an X, especially a green X, i. e. Excel.

Validation

Resolved in microsoft/vscode GitHub issue #71827. Community reactions: 91 upvotes.

Verification Summary

Worked: 9
Partial: 1
Failed: 1
Last verified Mar 14, 2026

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Environment

Submitted by

AC

Alex Chen

2450 rep

Tags

vscodeideeditoricon-brand