Entry tags:
Designish rant.
Just today, I stumbled across one of Adobe's blogs with a preview of the icons for the CS3 programs.
And, oh dear, they're horrid. Take a look. Agh! Who thought the periodic table of elements was so bloody awesome for graphics applications? There must be some serious Dmitri Mendeleev fanboys at Adobe, whom I can only assume got terribly confused and mistook design or marketing for chemistry.
Seriously, though, there are two problems with this "theme". First, it's all text. It's much easier to identify a program by a symbol, like a feather or a magnified eye, as have been the previous icons for Photoshop. But two white letters on a square isn't recognizable at all. With text, I need to spell out the application in my head to figure which it is I want to click, while the image is quickly associated with the application. It boils down to trying to remember that Ps is Photoshop versus seeing a trippy feather and thinking "Image Editing Program!" There's also inconsistency: Ai is for Adobe Illustrator. Why stick Adobe in front of Illustrator but not Photoshop? It just leads to confusion. I'll be trying to remember what application starts with an A.
Here's an example of how ridiculous this periodic table of buttons is: the same text theme extended to the Photoshop toolbar. If I opened up Photoshop and saw that, I wouldn't even try to use it.
The second problem, one that's been plaguing Adobe since they started calling their programs "Creative Suite," is indistinguishability. I can no longer keep the icons for my CS2 programs in the same place on my dock or desktop. There's the constant problem of clicking on ImageReady or Photoshop when I want to launch Illustrator, clicking Bridge or ImageReady trying to go into Photoshop, and so on. The problem is that there's too much commonality between icons. They're all trippily colored organic objects (feather, flower, shell) on a white box. This would not irritate me as much if it didn't take so long for each program to load so I can close it and open the right one. The pre-CS versions (magnified eye, globe, headshot of Venus de Milo) were so varied that it was easy to tell them apart. There was no commonality, and guess what, that worked just fine.
Another problem is that it's falling to the curse of Web 2.0 design - Colorful! Shiny! Buttons! Look, we dipped everything in plexiglass! What's needed is something that works, not some pretty corporate identity. And for a company so deep in graphics applications that they apparently need several bilge pumps just to keep the shiny happy graphics from flooding the office and drowning several of the shorter programmers, they sure seem to know nothing about design. The ultimate rule of graphic design, which should be the most sacred mantra of the designer and the one that shall permit no exception, has been tortured, vandalized, violated, drawn, quartered, and fed to the vultures before its skeleton is left to collect dust in the damp, dank, and rank dungeons that I assume Adobe has. What is that rule?
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION.
It's really that simple. And I wonder just how good Adobe productions really function if they can't figure that out.
And, oh dear, they're horrid. Take a look. Agh! Who thought the periodic table of elements was so bloody awesome for graphics applications? There must be some serious Dmitri Mendeleev fanboys at Adobe, whom I can only assume got terribly confused and mistook design or marketing for chemistry.
Seriously, though, there are two problems with this "theme". First, it's all text. It's much easier to identify a program by a symbol, like a feather or a magnified eye, as have been the previous icons for Photoshop. But two white letters on a square isn't recognizable at all. With text, I need to spell out the application in my head to figure which it is I want to click, while the image is quickly associated with the application. It boils down to trying to remember that Ps is Photoshop versus seeing a trippy feather and thinking "Image Editing Program!" There's also inconsistency: Ai is for Adobe Illustrator. Why stick Adobe in front of Illustrator but not Photoshop? It just leads to confusion. I'll be trying to remember what application starts with an A.
Here's an example of how ridiculous this periodic table of buttons is: the same text theme extended to the Photoshop toolbar. If I opened up Photoshop and saw that, I wouldn't even try to use it.
The second problem, one that's been plaguing Adobe since they started calling their programs "Creative Suite," is indistinguishability. I can no longer keep the icons for my CS2 programs in the same place on my dock or desktop. There's the constant problem of clicking on ImageReady or Photoshop when I want to launch Illustrator, clicking Bridge or ImageReady trying to go into Photoshop, and so on. The problem is that there's too much commonality between icons. They're all trippily colored organic objects (feather, flower, shell) on a white box. This would not irritate me as much if it didn't take so long for each program to load so I can close it and open the right one. The pre-CS versions (magnified eye, globe, headshot of Venus de Milo) were so varied that it was easy to tell them apart. There was no commonality, and guess what, that worked just fine.
Another problem is that it's falling to the curse of Web 2.0 design - Colorful! Shiny! Buttons! Look, we dipped everything in plexiglass! What's needed is something that works, not some pretty corporate identity. And for a company so deep in graphics applications that they apparently need several bilge pumps just to keep the shiny happy graphics from flooding the office and drowning several of the shorter programmers, they sure seem to know nothing about design. The ultimate rule of graphic design, which should be the most sacred mantra of the designer and the one that shall permit no exception, has been tortured, vandalized, violated, drawn, quartered, and fed to the vultures before its skeleton is left to collect dust in the damp, dank, and rank dungeons that I assume Adobe has. What is that rule?
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION.
It's really that simple. And I wonder just how good Adobe productions really function if they can't figure that out.