Adobe Creative Suite 3 comes with a bold new set of icons. Really, really bold. Daringly bold:
Too daring? Doth Adobe dareth in overabundance? Oh yes. They’re mystery meat and ignore you in favor of the Adobe Desktop Branding System ExperienceTM:
Taken in isolation, the individual icons are in no way spectacular - that was never their role. Their elegance comes from how the entire desktop brand system works as a whole. The more Adobe apps you have, the better the system works.
Ryan Hicks, Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe
Icons need recognizability, differentiation, scanability, and obviousness — all these babies all went out the window with the bathwater. If this were the late 90’s, I’d be legally obligated to call it the binary baby and cyberbathwater, but luckily in Amalgamated Button Manufacturers vs. Ashcroft the Supreme Court overturned the Information Interstate Superhighway Nomenclature and Pothole Filling Act of 1994.
Pop Quiz! Using the image above, you have four-tenths of a second to pick out the icon for Encore readysetgo!
You fail!* If you can’t pick the icon out of the tastefully-arranged Branding Experience, do you think you’ll find it when it’s 4:53 PM on the Friday of your daughter’s Little League Baseball World Series and you have to finish the already-four-days-late project that was so crucial no one got back to you for two weeks when you told them you needed that spreadsheet and why doesn’t anyone in this office support you because don’t they know that staring at the kitten poster doesn’t stop you from wondering if the carpet-covered walls are flammable? Less dramatically (you’re pretty high-strung, aren’t you?), there will be a constant speedbump to pick one pair of letters on a little color-coded lozenge out of the chaos of your desktop and especially out of other paris of letters on little color-coded lozenges. The more Adobe apps you have, the worse the system works. You read instead of glance, search instead of find.
Yes, I know you said you didn’t fail because you’re special and you always acheive the rhetorical challenges posted on blogs. No need to post self-congratulatory comments.
Odd how they didn’t carry over the Adobe Branding System Experience to packaging. Let’s just imagine how spectacular it could look:
Can you imagine a shelf full of these at your local computer store? I can. A solid wall of shiny color tiles with nothing to catch your eye or reward your attention. I feel branded, and not just in a dirty way.
Let’s savor the branding. Lean in and breathe deep, and swish the flavor around in your mouth to taste the full body. Ahh. It’s like a fine wine, except that instead of getting better with age it will start looking like an avocado green and harvest gold kitchen in a few years.
So where does that leave us? Now we complete our exploration into the brandosphere by, as they say there, inverting the dominant paradigm to push the envelope back into the box.
This is a replacement icon set by Adam Betts (Windows version by Eli) and includes document icons. It’s a nice attempt at making icons easier to pick out: while they’re still all in identical boxes the color swirls have a bit of shape to them.
And that’s plenty for the inaugural entry of Icon O’Clock. Check back every weekday at 10:04 AM (Central) for more icon goodness. If you’re a designer, contact me if you’d like to be featured.
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I looked at that and immediately thought “this was designed by a left-brained person who spends massive amounts of time working on Adobe products.” That would be great if their target audience consisted largely of left-brained, symbol-oriented people. For a company that produces art & design software, that’s a pretty monumental gaffe. Most artists did not enjoy their chemistry class — why bring back bad memories?
When you’re working on a product, it’s really easy to get “developer’s blinders.” You talk about it day-in, day-out for years and years, and it becomes blazingly obvious to you that the name and icon and function are all associated. You know, for example, that “Photoshop” is an appropriate program for producing novel images — but their name implies that the program will require a photograph as source material. Similarly, opaque icons acquire a meaning all their own when you’ve been staring at them for a long time — everyone at Adobe knows that a triple-looped swirl means “Acrobat,” but why on earth should it? The icon seems far more appropriate for a math visualization package.
This isn’t a big enough mistake to destroy a really good line of products. Still, I imagine that the Adobe kids will get bored of the style quickly and Adobe will revert to something sane(r) for the next set. After all, one of the biggest reasons to change up a perfectly good set of icons is boredom, and these icons won’t relieve that for long.
Oy.
As a software developer who deals with a handful of Adobe products on a daily basis… I have to admit that I’ve already had problems with their previous icon scheme. Two programs that I frequently have to run in related circumstances already have near-identical icons. I am constantly firing up the wrong app as it is.
The office hasn’t upgraded yet and I’ll have to see the new icons in action before knowing if they really start to bug me. As it is, I don’t see how they could really get much worse for my personal application ;)
I have also made some CS3 replacement icons, but the difference between mine and all the other alternative replacement icon sets that I have seen so far is that my icons actually make use of icons, rather than the 2-letter “periodic table†style — so imagine a complete set of how Device Central and Acrobat, etc. currently look.
http://www.archimediadesign.com/assorted/cs3icons/
Hey, not bad. Why didn’t you use the Flash logo for that icon?