ScaleNine

Today the specifics of Adobe’s C3 product offerings were announced and it’s quite a lineup of software. It’s the biggest release of software in the company’s history. I can’t wait to start using the new CS3 products, but what initially caught my attention was the way Adobe’s branding has visually transitioned to include products acquired from Macromedia as well as products developed after that.

Many people have voiced their opinions of likes and dislikes of Adobe’s approach to visually representing their products. However, after seeing the a larger role out of branded packaging it seems to make more sense. It’s almost as if Adobe had to go the route of breaking down their product icons to a very simple form — type, color and shape, part of the core of what Adobe deals with. It’s a lot of products that can work in tandem with each other in a variety of combinations.

Not only that, but dealing with simple aspects in form gives Adobe the ability to make those icons, and their basic constructs, into what ever helps make their products and their connections to each other more understandable. The icons of CS2 may have been more appropriate at the time, but their were much fewer overlaps in the product line. Now, you having things going from Photoshop to Illustrator to Flash and back again in a variety of ways. There’s is an overlapping of workflows from web to print and what better way to represent that than colors and the ways they blend together, like on the new packaging.

Flexibility is also a benefit of having such open-ended icons. Those square icons can grow into bands of color, become three dimensional blocks in an Adobe Rubik’s Cube, easily morph into bars in a chart to represent sales, or break the square shape and rely on the type and color as identifiers.

I’ve also noticed that others who have seen Adobe’s new icons and corresponding color wheel image begin creating their own metaphors for what those icons represent. They are pixels that make up the image of Adobe. They are color swatches making up Adobe’s palette of products. They are elements that make up a atom or DNA like structure. It’s interesting what happens when you take away such descriptive visual elements like those of CS2. People start making their own.

All of this can be seen as advantages that tie in appropriately with Adobe’s “Creative License” statements. The directions this new branding initiative can go are only limited to those behind it and I can only imagine how large this spectrum is really going to get.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.