The new Adobe icons and branding

Category Media Pc, Soft, Graphics | Permalink | 27. March 2007

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So many voices have expressed their thoughts on Adobe’s new icons so far and one of the more noticeable one from users is that they all thought it was some temporary place holder art. When I first saw the splash screen and application icon of Adobe Photoshop CS3 my thinking pattern was that Macromedia had its influence in the branding process: the idea of using different colors for each application and the way the splash screen is organized.
Adobe chooses to go with a two-letter mnemonic
The color association that is carried throughout the product’s desktop brand and primary imagery makes total sense to me. The absence of illustrative elements as we saw in previous versions needs really getting use to. If you look in the Dock, most icons are like pictures and visually very detailed so it’s like they are all shouting “choose me, me”. Adobe’s new icons are so basic and stand out instantly even in a crowded Dock. That’s a thing Macromedia always had with their icons, you could immediately tell they belong together. Jason Santa Maria said:

“Plus, baking in the action of having to read the icon just to decipher it adds an unnecessary step.”

As much as I respect Jason I’m not agreeing with him, because it’s only two letters and I personally immediately see the “Ai” just by looking and not by a literal read. It was much harder to differentiate the previous ones, in fact I more than once confused ImageReady with Photoshop. The natural look didn’t have any meaning other then being pretty to use as marketing collateral.

Talking about typography, the font used in the icons was created by Robert Slimbach, known from typefaces like Adobe Garamond, Adobe Jenson, Myriad (co-designed with Carol Twombly) …

You might wonder why Acrobat Reader hasn’t “Ar” as icon or “Pd” or something, just to take the same line with the rest of the products. The curvy triangle is so well known that it’s obvious they kept using it for the icon. I think if the other applications had a similar icon over the years, they would have done the same. Since there are none they decided to use a two-letter mnemonic ‘nickname’ system as their primary identifier.

Why the re-branding was such a big challenge

While this color-wheel beautifully presents the approach in the entire re-branding, I think it fails in bringing the message across on how it will tie together as a whole. The idea is great though but the color-wheel is very overwhelming, taking away all the attention and the icons are scattered over the place. People seems to fail to grasp the bigger picture. It seems that most just want to make it look pretty because the app is giving these possibilities, but it’s more than that, it’s about problem-solving too. It’s a major undertaking to revamp and re-brand both Adobe’s and Macromedia’s apps as one brand, we’re talking thousands of icons.
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