CS3 icons… a mistake?
21 12 2006… I certainly believe so, if I didn’t see it posted on John Nack’s blog I honestly wouldn’t have believed this was for real.
I won’t profess to be the worlds greatest designer but the whole look and feel doesn’t work for me at all. Particularly the two-letter icons just look horrible. Not sure if its the typography, the uppercase/lowercase combination or something else.
Letters don’t get across the same message you want to convey as an icon can do, not to mention that they can have different connotations in different languages.
Square shapes work in certain situations but for Creative Suite products this does seem like a strange option. It doesn’t really come across very well, I’d associate squares with words static, reliable, unmovable; not creative, flexible, open you might think of for products like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
The only differentiating factor in products ranging from a LiveCycle document policy server to something like Audition audio editing software is the letter combination and the background gradient color for the square. Sure it might make it recognizable as all being part of the Adobe brand but does it give the user any indication of what the product is about?
That said, there do seem to be a few icons that don’t go by the letter combination, things like the extension manager and what I can only assume is Flash Lite (naming conflict with the Flash product letters?). There is something to be said about consistency, even consistency of something horrible is better than none at all. By breaking the rules for certain of these icons it takes away even more from the whole approach.
Then there’s the “don’t make me think” directive - it almost felt like doing a mind game figuring out what the letter combinations stand for: Fl for Flash, or is it Flex or FlashLite? Oh no, Flex is Fx and FlashLite has an icon. Makes perfect sense? Not to me.
What happens in the next release of Creative Suite with these icons? I for one would prefer to see a reference to CS3 in the icons and go with a regular glyph approach.
To summarize I think there are some fundamental flaws in these proposed icons and hope Adobe takes this to heart and thoroughly reviews them. I’m sure you can do better.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/the_other_cs3_icons.html
John’s defending them, but the public outcry against them is pretty strong. Looking at the letters, I have no idea what most of those products are, though I bet I would from the icons. I hope they aren’t too proud, or too late in the development process to consider changing them.
All people have seen has been a single cryptic screenshot, rather than the full design approach… even have to guess the glyph abbreviations, for instance.
Today in the office I’ll see who hasn’t left on holidays yet, see if we can accelerate the publishing of info on the actual design problems that had to be solved, and the larger context beyond that screenshot.
jd/adobe
Thanks John, I have no doubt there are some solid arguments and a complete strategy behind the icons. To me it seems like one of those things where an idea got the better of more practical arguments.
More than likely inspired by the periodic table of elements, going towards one color of the spectrum for each product type etc. I can see how that works as a design concept and for marketing purposes but its not selling me.
It might seem rather silly to be discussing minor matters such as icons to such a degree but for years we’ve been indoctrinated with “experience matters”, the teams have done an incredible job with the new and improved UI in the range of CS3 products making it look very slick and polished indeed and the only thing I can say here is — the experience sucks.
You won’t sell any less licenses for going with this set of icons but I have no doubt it’ll hurt in how Adobe is perceived as a brand. First impressions count, and in my view this isn’t a good one at all.
CS … That stands for
Chemical Symbols
right?