Practicalmadness

Oh, I am so glad to see that (a) I was right that the new “periodic symbol” icon design for Photoshop CS3 is in fact the real, final one, and (b) that a number of designers I admire and respect are with me in hating it. Not least because it’s not just Photoshop — the new icon design is being carried over to not just the rest of Creative Suite, but every single product Adobe sells. (As well as a few we all thought were dead…PageMaker? Really? PageMaker?)

Jason Santa Maria hates it:

When making icons, you usually try to design something simple and recognizable to identify things. At the expense of creating a family of icons, you’ve watered them down so much as to be unrecognizable at a glance.

The plain facts that monitor variations kill the subtle differences, and there are quite a few color blind people out there who can’t distinguish certain shades from one another, should have led you towards a backup plan. That may be what the periodic letters are for, but in choosing to go with one font, and one orientation, you’ve created enough noise that none of them would be recognizable among the others. Plus, baking in the action of having to read the icon just to decipher it adds an unnecessary step.

This is an utter design failure.

Dave Shea hates it:

Maybe most of the people who have seen them so far just simply don’t like them, but everyone else will. No? No. There are ways to quantify how badly these icons work for their intended purpose.

They fail because there is no shape variation. Every icon is contained within an identical square. Nothing breaks the silhouette, the only shape variation occurs inside the square, in the form of the letters. But using a common typeface, stroke weight, and posture across every icon means the various letters have more in common with each other than they differ, and at a glance they all blend together.

And these icons fail because conveying important information through colour must be done with care; the current design appears to sample at random from the colour spectrum.

Adam Betts hates ‘em:

This is what happens when you let the marketing team takes over the graphic designing.

And Veerle Pieters…kinda likes it?

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.

Me, I agree totally with Mssrs. Shea and Santa Maria. And with all due respect to Veerle Pieters, I think she’s missed the point: I don’t think anyone is saying that the icons don’t stand out from other companies’ icons or that they’re not visually appealing. I do happen to think they look nice, and from a purely aesthetic standpoint they are a huge improvement over feathers, sunflowers, butterflies and oddly vaginal seashells.

The problem is when you apply an almost identical icon template to more than two dozen products, some of which have overlapping uses, some of which have diametrically different uses. Why in the world do we need such a tight, blurry family resemblance between ColdFusion, Audition and RoboHelp? Why is the fact that these products come from the same company so important that they need to share an icon design?

I think the single biggest failure of this new icon system is the use (or rather, gross misuse) of color. Beyond continuing the use of certain colors for certain brands — red for Flash and Acrobat, yellow-orange for Illustrator, lime green for Dreamweaver — there is absolutely no logic to where products have been placed on the color wheel, so those of us with perfect color vision aren’t getting anything beyond prettiness from the shading of the icons. And people who have trouble seeing color will find these icons more than a little bit inscrutable:

At least with The Feather, you could tell at a glance which one was Photoshop, color or no color. And with the old Photoshop “eye” logo, the association between the visuals and the app made perfect sense.