Historically, Photoshop and its Adobe pals have been identifiable by their varied but similar icons: Illustrator used the “Birth of Venus” in a variety of different abstractions, Photoshop used the eyeball and beach montage, then later the rainbow feather. With CS3 an entirely new set of icons was developed, which some have described as “Periodic Table” icons. Each application gets a colored square with a 2-letter representation of the application’s name. This has taken some getting used to, but I have found that it fits nicely into my dock, and is quickly recognizable and easy to click on, unlike the old feather/flower icons from CS which always made me stop and think and sometimes I ended up clicking on the wrong one or scrolling back and forth in my dock trying to find it.
So I was dismayed to discover today that Adobe has changed the icon yet again, this time to a bizarre speech-bubble-like shiny amateur blob thing that looks like it could have been a design student’s freshman project. What were they thinking? This icon does not say anything about the brand, nor does it look like something that could be created in Photoshop.
This new icon I am hoping is not going to be an indication of the dumbing down of the product itself. Photoshop has become one of those brand-names-turned-lower-case words, like kleenex or xerox, but the program is still a powerful tool well integrated with its fellow graphics tools. My fingers are crossed that this is just a work in progress.
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