New Windows 10 Fluent Design Paint 3D Icon

Last Updated on January 22, 2021 by Mathew Diekhake

Apart from getting the features and navigation right, there isn’t much else you can do to a modern operating system other than making sure the graphics upon that navigation are as good as they can be. It is no surprise then that both Apple and Microsoft put a lot of effort into the appearance of the icons you get around the operating system. For Apple, this is on full display immediately from the Dock, which is located at the bottom of the screen, and in our opinion, is definitely part of the attraction when using macOS.

Windows 10 doesn’t have a Dock like macOS does—instead, it prefers to keep the desktop and taskbar mostly clean and uncluttered—but it doesn’t take long after clicking on the famous Windows Start menu before the icons are on full display; and these Windows 10 icons, along with the general UI appearance, are how you immediately know older versions of Windows such as the popular Windows 7 are officially outdated.

That being said, when Windows 10 was first released, it offered a mixture of icons—from Windows XP, Windows 2000, and even dating back as far as Windows 95! When you have icons dating that far back, there are going to be problems with getting those icons to mesh with one another because over time, what is graphically “in-style” changes to a large degree. Subsequently, it only made sense for Microsoft to work on an entirely new icons package for future versions of Windows 10; icons that would all be designed at the same time so not only would they suit each other but so they would also suit the operating system that surrounds them.

The first updated apps to roll out to Windows 10 users are the Mail and Calendar icons. This is likely because they’re viewed the most since they appear at the top of the Start menu and have the largest icons. Expect the rest of the icons to roll out to future builds of Windows 10 very soon.

Paint 3D is a raster graphics and 3D modeling application which is a refresh of Microsoft Paint. It is one of several 3D modeling and printing applications introduced or improved with the Windows 10 Creators Update, along with View 3D, Windows Mixed Reality, Holograms, and 3D Builder. Developed by Microsoft’s Lift London studio,[2] Paint 3D incorporates features of the Microsoft Paint and 3D Builder applications to combine a lightweight hybrid 2D-3D editing experience that allows users to pull in a variety of shapes from the app, their personal computer, and Microsoft’s OneDrive service.