For decades, Microsoft’s New Employee Orientation (NEO) has been an exciting in-person event, complete with live presenters and tables full of eager new colleagues. However, with the global shift to remote work, the Microsoft First Year Learning team sought to reinvent NEO as a virtual event.
My job, as Creative Director, was to reimagine NEO as a modern, fully remote, world-class training event through strategy and session design, graphics and visual identity, and video production.
After a six-month deep dive into Microsoft’s mission, brand, culture, and mindset, we helped the First Year Learning team define the event, its themes, and learning content. We positioned learning as entertainment for a global audience of new Microsoft employees.
We redesigned NEO to give new employees a shared foundation to make a meaningful impact and thrive at Microsoft.
Our main objective was to develop and implement a new visual identity for NEO that shares a point of view around the human experience of growth and learning while resonating emotionally with individuals across all geographies.
To meet this challenge, we crafted ‘Inner Light’—an exciting, 3D design system to represent the spark and energy within each employee and how it flourishes with curiosity.
Through hundreds of still and motion experiments, we discovered NEO’s visual identity. Reinventing NEO as a singular virtual event, we aligned all materials under one distinctive look and feel—a modern expression of fluidity and technology that evokes a sense of wonder in the moment and a curiosity for the future.
Illumination adds vibrancy and meaning, representing the learner and their journey of growth.
Motion and atmosphere offer dimension and a sense that the learner’s world is expanding to something greater.
The layers themselves represent individuality demonstrating how we come together to achieve unthinkable wonders—allowing each of us to truly make an impact.
Applied simply and elegantly, this building block brought to life each of the four sessions of NEO in abstract metaphors with cohesion and structure, while accommodating individual, global interpretation by NEO attendees.
We modernized a critical aspect of Microsoft’s culture and delivered it to a global audience.
When it all came together, we had developed a digital event in four parts: Taking care of you, Working together in a thriving culture, Empowering the world together, and A platform for your purpose. From session themes to template construction, we created the look and feel for the event and produced multiple video assets, including a welcome address from Satya Nadella.
