At E3, along with breaking news about the Xbox One S and the future Xbox Project Scorpio, Microsoft also unveiled a new way to create custom Xbox controllers that you can create, monogram, and purchase, all from the Microsoft Store.
To try it out, we logged in to the Store, and began to design our custom controller. The process is pretty simple (and by the way you can create and save your own creations, even without purchasing them, and share your masterpieces with others, or get some design ideas from the already saved creations).
While we’re excited about our upcoming rebrand to OnMSFT.com, and first thought about creating a controller using our new palette of colors, but although Microsoft promotes “over 8 million” possible color combinations, our more subdued new color palette didn’t quite fit the bill.
For example, the color choices for the main parts of the controller are basic but wide ranging:
… but for some of the peripheral parts, you just don’t have as much choice, and it all seems fairly arbitrary (although manufacturing every part in every color could get expensive fast, so there’s probably some logic behind the decisions).
So the next thought was to riff on the Microsoft Logo:
Since the color options change depending on what section of the controller you’re customizing (Body, Bumpers & triggers, D-pad, Thumbsticks, ABXY, View & Menu, Back), we had to get a little creative in choosing where to put each color, but it’s easy to try out different designs until everything fits.
We also added a custom “engraving” that goes in the middle front of the controller (it doesn’t show here, sorry, seems to be a problem accessing the engraving section, although we did complete the exercise!). Just imagine your own Windows Logo colored controller with OnMSFT.com engraved in the front!
Once we get our controller in hand, we’ll show it off and then give it away (details once we get them figured out!), but just in case you can head over to the Xbox Design Lab and design your own Xbox One custom controller, and show it off in the comments below.
