December 21, 2006
Icons Galore
December 21, 2006, 10:57 PM | 7 Comments
Yesterday Adobe unveiled part of their new branding strategy for CS3 (Creative Suite version 3) and already there has been a lot of talk (and mock) about Adobe’s strategy behind these icons. Some of the reaction is positive, but most of it seems to be negative, which begs the question: is Adobe making a mistake here?
I won’t go into my feelings about the icons in too much depth, because I believe they’ve already been covered by the other articles I’ve linked to but I will briefly voice my opinions and then open up the topic for conversation.
First off, let me just say that I don’t like them. They may make more sense than a feather and flowers, but I think they are far too similar to each other and look like something I made for my VB 3 applications when I was taking a grade 10 programming course in high school. At first I just assumed that the Photoshop icon was just for the recently released Photoshop CS3 beta, but it seems to me that this is part of a re-branding for Adobe’s Creative Suite and that these icons are planned for the final release.
I know there are much more important things to whine about than an application’s icon (or suite of applications as the case may be), but I think that an icon for a program is just as important as a company’s logo. My opinion is that an icon should be easily recognizable on its own, or when grouped with other icons on your Dock, Quick Launch bar or desktop. To me, an icon represents part of an application’s branding regardless of whether it’s a standalone application or part of a suite of applications. In Adobe’s case, most of their Creative Suite applications fit into both of those categories.
After giving it some thought, I realised that I’m really impressed with the way Apple has branded each of its iLife applications. If you take a look at the icons for Mail, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, Photo Booth, iCal, iMovie and iDVD, they clearly illustrate good icon design. Each application’s icon clearly says what the program is for and is also unique enough from the rest of the icons to be recognizable when they’re grouped together.
When it comes to Adobe, does anyone remember the days of the “eye” icon that Photoshop 5, 6 and 7 had? At least that icon was somewhat descriptive. What are your thoughts?