The Periodic Table of Adobe
Last year, Adobe bought out Macromedia and acquired their product catalog (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, etc.). The Macromedia products for a while were kept separate under their “Studio 8″ brand while the big Adobe products resided under the “Creative Suite 2″ title. Ready to start integrating the two, Adobe dropped their web design program, GoLive, in favor of Dreamweaver as part of CS 2.3. Well, with CS 3 approaching, Adobe is finally integrating the product lines even more. ImageReady is being dropped in favor of Fireworks, and (with the exception of Acrobat and Flash), all Adobe products are being re-iconified under a unified system. At least for the near future, this will go down as something along the lines of the “Periodic Table of Adobe”. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself.
Now, the appearance of the icons on that wheel I don’t really think is fair to the design team because that’s not how people are going to ultimately see them. I agree that like that the concept looks really bad, and having just one of those on my desktop would probably look strange also. However, since a bunch of applications are packaged with each version of CS, I can conceptualize the idea of seeing 5-7 of those together as a pretty cool idea. People have also made some mockups of what it would look like, and the result isn’t that bad. A bunch of the existing users are complaining that these icons are “too difficult” to recognize instantly and just plain ugly on top of that, but let’s face it, a feather doesn’t represent Photoshop any better than the blue “Ps” symbol does. I’d even bet that most people after working with their computer long enough don’t even bother looking/processing the icon itself, but instead just know what position the icons are in on their desktop/dock and launch them that way. To summarize, I think this is largely just a knee jerk reaction and most people (who don’t change them to CS2 style icons) will cope just fine.