The invisible studio

With every release of Visual Studio comes a new icon, and Visual Studio 2017 was no exception. One of the designers responsible for the icon proudly wrote a long blog article describing its creation. Unfortunately, it is irredeemably flawed.

Here is how the icon looks on my Windows 7 taskbar, to the right of the old Visual Studio 2015 icon. After I first added the icon to the taskbar I thought I'd made a mistake, as it took some studying to actually see it against the background.

The problem is that the icon consists of a single colour, and if the background happens to be a similar colour then the icon is almost invisible. Here's another example for you to play Spot the VS2017 icon: