The CS6 Desktop Brand System | Hacker News Reader

The CS6 Desktop Brand System

blogs.adobe.com

58 pointsfaramarz34 comments

I find these icons particularly bad, but I guess they met their goal:

"We finally landed on the forms you see below. These icons are bright and bold. We love this and pushed it as hard as we could. If you see just one or two, they stick out a bit, but when lined up chromatically (as so many of us like to do), they own the dock… or any other context."

Owning the dock shouldn't have been the goal. They should have a nice, non-distracting icon that tells me which program is which.

The very first of the five major requirements they listed:

"Legible. Application icons should be distinguishable from one another at small icon sizes, on file icons, and in the OS. Icons must be differentiable beyond color and should be legible for color blind persons via shape, letter-forms, tone, or other method."

They sure didn't meet that stated goal. I guess I'll be copying over the icon from Illustrator 10 yet again...

I don't see the dock much because I just quickly command+tab my way to the windows as it's more efficient.

But I think the departure from the solid colored blocks towards the colored strokes and text is the wrong way to go because of how much more subtle it is.

Who is the target audience who would have enough of these applications installed that they would "own the dock"? At most I only ever used maybe 5 programs out of the whole Creative Suite enough to maintain shortcuts for them. Even the people I know who are professional animators or whatever and live in the Adobe world don't typically use much more than that number.

I do like the new look (especially the splash screens), although I rarely use any of the programs anymore. But if I were responsible for the branding, I would have looked at the most common combinations of programs as distinct sets and picked colors that way. The entirety of the suite package only makes sense to look at as a single entity to Adobe... a user who has Dreamweaver installed is unlikely to also have AfterEffects, and so on.

I can't quite tell if this is great, or if they're really over-thinking it.

That said, I do appreciate that Adobe hasn't fallen into the trap of making their apps blue circles like seemingly every other app.

"We know that every release requires change and that the change will make some people unhappy. In this regard, we consider our work for CS6 a success."

I don't know many designers who consider negative feedback a sign of success. We're not talking about controversial fine art, but rather a way to communicate the power and legacy associated with Adobe's creative software.

If Adobe's goal is uninspired product branding that unnerves the very profession their software is marketed to, then yes, I would consider their work a success as well.

In art, evoking emotions from a piece is what matters most. Your opinion on its beauty is but second-rate in the experience.

Had you been indifferent, Adobe would have done a bad job.

I'm a little shocked at the negativity towards, of all things, an icon and a splash screen.

That said, I'm a little more shocked that people are reacting more negatively to the splashes that are a bit more expressive. The past couple CS releases have been, from that perspective, plain and boring.

Instead of working to make the splash screens look prettier, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest they should work to make the program load fast enough so it doesn't need a splash screen.

Do you see all that stuff flashing by when say, Photoshop starts up? Those are plugins. I'm not exactly sure what they can do other than remove the features outright.

Anyways, it starts up in roughly 6 or 7 seconds on my spinning rust drive. I can't find this something to get worked up about, especially given the feature set of Adobe products.

Why do the plugins need to load first?

Does the file you're opening use them? Why can't it load faster so if I've made a mistake opening the program I can close it before it does all that plugin loading?

Splash screens are just a lazy way of saying the user's time isn't valuable.

Photoshop plugins don't work that way for the most part. There's no way to tell from a given file "uses" a plugin or not - usually a plugin is a specialized image manipulation method.

>Splash screens are just a lazy way of saying the user's time isn't valuable.

Wow. Hyperbole much? I'd rather get all my loading done up front instead of waiting per file or per action anyways. Secondly, it's 8 seconds or so per app start. Less if you have an SSD or a non-recommended-reqs system. Perspective.

Also consider these are pro-tier applications. The target market isn't going to be exiting their apps again and again, rather launch once and stay inside them.

I dunno about Photoshop - I never use it - but in Illustrator, a lot of core program functionality is implemented as plugins nowadays. For CS5.1, plug-ins/extensions has 53 items, plug-ins/tools has 53.

I guess they could do some kind of lazy loading, but that'd be, you know, work to implement, and they're too busy with stuff like their own (broken) custom window routines to get Windowsesque MDI on the Mac.

The Adobe Reader plugin also loaded tons of default plugins (including JavaScript and 3D support) when opening any PDF. That's (one of the reasons) why it was so slow.

Yea, I remember Kas Thomas talking about that. What is interesting is that he works at Adobe as a Technology Evangelist.

It's not whether they should be plain or colorful...it's whether the splashes jibe with the products (and their positioning) so the two look cohesive together. Adriana (Victoria's Secret) would make a lovely model, but I don't think she'd the first choice for Morgan Stanley.

If you see the new CS6 UIs (and the new tools like SpeedGrade), you'll see "plain and boring" grays, but the look is natural for the pro market. The splashes are completely antithetical to that look, and seeing a colorful Nickelodeon splash leading you to the somber grays in the UI is kind of bizarre.

>I'm a little shocked at the negativity towards, of all things, an icon and a splash screen.

People, in general, just have a hard time dealing with change.

I'm not a huge fan of the new icons/splash screens either, but I'm sure I'll get used to it and in a while CS5 will look dated.

I'll be the guy who actually likes it. The new splash screens make me really pleased. Nothing is very bland, and they certainly represent clean and elegant designs you can make with the products.

Could someone with graphic design background explain why colors that are equally spaced on the color wheel would look like "part of a family" any more than erratically spaced colors? I think the old colors were far more attractive.

Colors that are equally spaced should look like less of a family.

The old, chromatically clustered colors staked out thematic areas of the color wheel, and by not using the whole thing, retained some degree of ownable identity. The CS6 color palette barely even qualifies as a palette.

"Equally spaced on the color wheel" sounds like something that a manager came up with, and everyone in the room just nodded their heads yes and made it happen.

Bummer.

Looking at the colour wheel in the article it seems that they choose a set that has high contrast (colours close to each other lack contrast) while haveing a similar degree of luminosity. If they choose erratically then some products would have colours to similar.

The process is interesting but heading the wrong way IMHO. CS6 branding lost the quality they tried to improve. Far too rainbowy , eye-candy iconified. The color derivation gives a shallow neon glow appearance, the splash textures are distracting, I have to look to see what product it is.

To me CS3/CS4 theme is almost centered, future redesigns are diminishing returns guaranteed, unless a disrupting stroke.

I hate the splashes...they look like kids' costumes: busy and over-saturated. Icons are boring and unimaginative too. Pity because I think Aobe did a great job with what matters, the UIs (pretty challenging if you think of how many products CS6 has and how each one does things a little differently). The splashes IMO look really unprofessional compared to the pro and subdued look of the new UIs. I really hope Adobe changes the splashes (and the icons) for the next release. In fact, I'm thinking of writing to Adobe to provide an update to change at least the splashes even for this version...they're really an eyesore that I have to endure each time I start an app.

These are absolutely hideous and amateurish. Something a newbie 'designer' would come up with in terms of color schemes and shapes and feel damn proud of it just because of the shock value of its 'uniqueness'.

Even though I rely less and less on Adobe products as time goes on, I really like seeing their design process for coming up with these icons and splash screens.

I liked the older branding more. The greater variation in saturation essentially acted as a second dimension of information that made distinguishing the icons easier. And while I can understand why AfterEffects and Premiere have some similar colors, I think they got too subtle...

These icons will look stupid against a bright background.

But since most Adobe tools use a dark, custom interface that doesn't match the OS at all, I guess they won't feel any regret about ignoring those who prefer UIs with bright backgrounds.

Looks like a great failed art project :)

I don't care much for the splashes or dock icons, but the flat file icons look strange, they will look out of place in Finder. Gradients and shadows can help make sense of shapes, and make them more recognizable.

Since I really only want PS, AI and FW installed, the entire color wheel will not be appreciated here. I think the new icons look nice though, and I like the periodic table theme with dark grey base color and highlights.

A step backwards from CS5's branding in my opinion.

The splash screens are over done and the icons are obnoxious. Sometimes more isn't better

Here's the gist of it: we tried harder than ever to make even uglier dock icons... and we succeeded.

Did Adobe fix its horrific installers in the latest versions?

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