Challenge
For decades, Microsoft’s New Employee Orientation (NEO) was an energizing in-person experience, designed to connect new hires to the company’s culture from day one. But with the shift to remote work, the First Year Learning team needed to reimagine NEO as a fully virtual event—without losing its emotional impact, scale, or sense of shared community.
Solution
As Creative Director, I led the reinvention of NEO into a four-part, digital-first experience designed to inspire Microsoft’s 27,000+ new employees worldwide. We began with a deep dive into Microsoft’s brand, mission, and culture—then worked with stakeholders to define the event’s themes, structure, and storytelling cadence.
To anchor the creative system, we developed a new visual identity centered on the metaphor of “Inner Light”—representing the spark within every employee and their journey of growth. Through hundreds of motion and still design experiments, we created a flexible, 3D visual language that conveyed curiosity, individuality, and collective impact across global geographies.
We applied the system across every touchpoint: session design, graphics packages, motion design, and video content—including a welcome message from Satya Nadella. The result was a cohesive, emotionally resonant virtual experience that modernized a core part of Microsoft’s culture and united a global cohort of employees around purpose, growth, and belonging.
Inner Light, Applied
With simplicity and elegance, 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.
In Motion
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.
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.
