I got passed on John Nack’s blog post on to the new family of Adobe CS3 icons. Which let me on to various designers opions of them; yay or nay. Dave Shea does’nt like them and provides a couple of mockups of how they might look on your Mac or Windows desktop.

I’m on the nay side big time. What a task they have to pull so many products together with a unified identity while maintaining the aspects of both brands (Adobe & Macromedia) that have invested value with past users and at the same time being clearly Adobe.

I think they’ve missed the mark though. The new icons are so generic and similar as to be entirely useless. How many seconds will I waste each time I have to decipher which icon is for Illustrator and which for Photoshop. Seconds add up to minutes and minutes countless hours! … And hours countless days…well maybe not, but it would be a frustration I’m sure.

Icon usually infers iconic which none of them seem to be. There’s no striking sillouette to distinguish them from one another and the graphical reference of letters in each one are also far too similar to be useful. I can actually imagine moments of trepidation in clicking an icon with a suite of products loaded on your system, some possibly new or unfamiliar, unsure of what will open up…The graphical representation of letters in the old Macromedia icons had different enough silhouettes as to remain iconic and recognizable in an instant without having to comprehend a ‘d’ or an ‘f’.  It’s more ‘complex’ and difficult to distinguish the difference between similar, even simple, letterforms than either simple or complex graphical representations of objects.
I think the test should be; ‘Once learned, instantly recognizable’. These icons don’t pass.

Evidently Microsoft.com launched a new home page on the 15th and I just found it.  Pretty slick. I like it.

80k full page fixed height and width background image? I love it! Something I would wish I could do but wouldn’t mostly because of file size, load time and fixed page dimensions. Unfortunately you have to look at a hideous blue pixelated halo on their logo and tagline until it loads up…even on a fast connection, but hey, it’s worth the wait. Of all the things I’d imagine you don’t want looking crappy for any length of time it’s your branding…
I like the idea of the new ‘image browser’ style menu in concept mostly because I’m familiar with it and it is eye-candy but don’t like that if you browse away from the home page and come back you lose menu context and are back at square one. And why does the already diminutive main menu need to expand/collapse?  Why would I want to hide it? What do I need that extra space for?  Also think it’s a bit overwhelming at first having the browser navigation pop on top of the page. I like that idea for simple forms and actions related to the page beneath, but I’d want to avoid  a complex navigational element on top.

Anyway I like it ‘cuz it’s purdy.  I’m a sucker for shiny things.