The new icons may help with identification, but they are pretty utilitarian.

As a graphic designer, these icons are insulting to my design sense. CS and CS2 icons are gorgeous. And it’s not as if the products are cheap. And I kind of like the periodic table connection… communicates that design, creativity are elemental. They never got internalized–I guess because there’s no strong pre-existing symbolic association. Adobe (the Designer) could have taken a few more design steps and still kept the overall concepts intact.

Obviously voters could not tell if they were checking “Disagree” because they disagreed with Adobe’s icon choice, or because they disagree with the author not liking the icons. How much getting used-to is this going to take? Can author provide update with Key and sample dock?

They do not happen overnight, nor do they come cheap. Icons for a creative suite should reflect or at least suggest creativity. The periodic table idea is a little clever, but an icon for graphic design software should be a strong visual icon (not just text in a rounded corner box). Tell us by clicking on the VoxBox icon on the left side of this page. Also Acrobat & Flash remain more “iconic” along with a few less recognizable applications, interesting! What are they, NUTS???!!

Maybe I’ll make my own! I do know that I found the Macromedia icons for Flash and Dreamweaver easily recognizable and useful, while the CS2 ones were vague (although pretty). By contrast, I can easily find Dreamweaver and Flash.

There is no way to agree or disagree with that statement. Makes more sense than flowers, butterflies and feathers, but now that I’ve memorized those, these will be soooo boooooring in my dock. When I look at my row of icons on my Genie dock, I can never remember which is Photoshop and which is Illustrator until I look at the titles above them. If you compare what was checked to what people wrote it often doesn’t match. (feather, seashell, flower, butterfly? Certainly they are colourful but within such close proximity they do not stand out from each other.

What does an orange flower have to do with Illustrator CS2?

They probably thought they were being “clever” or “edgy” or “minimalist.” I say boring, pointless, annoying, ugly. The Adobe Line has become so massive that this direction does pull alll the applications into a family brand look. 3300+ icons in Line, Monochrome, and Solid style across 27 different categories.

more such styles. Helps to identify them better. You should not have to learn an icon. If they are going to do just a few letters to denote the program it should be something edgy and new like Macromedia did for their current icons. As you can probably guess I really dislike the last batch of Adobe icons. I just wish that they would dedicate the time on Freehand rather than these so called chemical icons.

No… any of us could have come up with these. Thank GOD all my apps don’t use this nomenclature – I would never find anything in my dock – everything would not only have two-letter designations, but not even adjacent letters in all cases (or Photoshop would be Ph). The new Acrobat 8 is targeted basically to office tasks, forgetting the graphic designers and even removing features DTP people needs. Return to the January 3, 2007, creativeprose. The Icons should be beautiful and illustrate conceptually what the programs strengths are. You couldn’t be more right.

I really like the CS2 icons, and the difference between the Macromedia & Adobe icons are GOOD! You gotta be joking! They put typical apps for a person in one area at complementary positions on the color wheel–eg Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign are very different colors. But the author may have a point; the icons will be beyond the ken of most users.

However, this is just jumping to the other extreme. The periodic table represents the building blocks of everything on an atomic scale – it is also a very good design for communicating a lot of complex ideas.

I think that the new designs are a poor reflection to the program’s abilities and to Adobe.

I understand the desire for brand consistency, but I think most users have cottoned onto the difference between the square Adobe logos and the inherited round Macromedia logos.

The lack of clever design reminds me of uncreative Mr. PC from the Mac commercials. Luckily for Adobe, the company has no serious competitor to pounce on this. They are sterile, and of course apply the dimensionality available as a Photoshop setting with the little drop shadow to float the colored background slightly above the surface of the page or screen. Download icons in all formats or edit them for your designs. Too many times in design the best solution is overlooked because it is simple. We could use a key as I could only decipher 11 of the icons.

that was the point, whether or not it makes sense, I don’t know. Too bad your minimalist approach missed the mark. My immediate response to the icons was straightforward, that they were like the elements in the periodic table and that the icons were a clever idea. ha…. I chose neutral because it is not clear which way means that I hate the new icons. If Br is Bridge, and Ps is Photoshop, why isn’t Illustrator Il? These icons are neither. Get high-quality, on-demand design from your brief.

Not the designer of the icons, but rather whoever approved them for widespread use. I do not want to have to figure out a whole new icon system in order to efficiently use the program. The new logos, if one can really call them that, put the products of both companies in the category of buzz words and acronyms, many of which are undecipherable to all but the “annointed” few. Case in point: an evolved logo. My next thought was maybe they are trying to build something with all the products together, but traditionally bricks are rectangular – not square. My clients would never accept such uninspired work. A bunch of icons made for the new Adobe Suite based off the classic look of the Moleskine notebook, crossed with the curved rectangles of the iPhone. What has happened to good visual design? Adobe aren’t stupid.

But when you see them all together to hard to tell what program is what. And even worse, when those icons got reduced in the dock, it was almost impossible to see what they represented. Someone should be fired.

Illustrator, Figma, etc. I never thought I would ever have to look at a periodic table outside of chem in high school! Also, I think people are looking at the large images linked to the article, rather than at small images crowded among a diversity of other eye-sugarplums in a dock or desktop or whatever. It just makes me even crankier than my original reaction….

Considering that these are all graphical design applications, the icons should reflect that. Manuel B. Garcia is a Licensed Professional Teacher (LPT) with specializations in... ughhh, too many to mention. Although these *will* certainly sink to the bottom of any creative pool. I think that Adobe is trying to create their own periodic table with these new icons. Figure 1. Now I can look forward to being really lost, trying to remember the symbols to concoct a simple layout!

These icons are not easily identifiable on the fly. If “strongly disagree” means I don’t like the icons, then I strongly disagree. The new icons are clean and functional, and work at nearly any size. …at least that’s what they look like.

I will continue to use the great CS products, but having to look at these icons each time I open an application will not be fun.