Comments on: Adobe’s new icons: Love or hate ‘em?

By: Nsdfgghfh

Nsdfgghfh — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:16:37 +0000

Now this topic is sore stupid. Forgive my apathetic comment but people find every reason to criticize products. A product should be rated based on its performance rather than cough icon cough. I am surpirsed at the stupidity and shallowness of people’s criticism. No matter what you do, people will always find something to complain or cry about. Hellooo… aren’t we supposed to judge this product based on its efficiency? Adobe CS3 is a fine product, people who criticize their icon because of its resemblance to the periodic table of elements are shallowest and narrowminded of people. So what if it looks like the PT? People, get a life and get something better to talk about… damnn!!.. ya’ll suck.

By: Michael S

Michael S — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:52:13 +0000

Loved them from the start. They look clean and simple, and convey information quickly through the periodic table like symbology and color coding.

Not everything needs to be over-designed. They’re easy and fast to locate on a small dock.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:02:38 +0000

I love them.

I’m a designer, as most everyone here is. I love how the Icons and the splash screens are so simple. Its like coming up to a nice clean canvas that i can splash out my creativity on.

By: James Reid

James Reid — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:00:02 +0000

Love em! I think these Icons are great… Less is more guys & gals, you can tell an educated designer created these, there is no need for all these fancy, image based, fluffy icons… All icons should be this simple!

Peace x

By: Hedi

Hedi — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:48:19 +0000

It seems nobody loves them… I hate them too :( But I love the CS 3 suite!

By: Catnip

Catnip — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:03:22 +0000

Sorry, link didn’t show up: http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/1251/iconcubenq0.jpg

By: Catnip

Catnip — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:01:53 +0000

When I first saw the icons, I didn’t know what to think of them. They were clean & crisp, but maybe too simplistic.

So I was undecided until I saw this:

Then I decided they kinda worked out alright. :-)

By: kub

kub — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:35:45 +0000

I wanna extract my eyes!!! I hate, I hate, I hate theeeem!! :P

By: drew

drew — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:48:03 +0000

Pretty far off the mark, if the intent was for them to be iconic.

If you want to make a branding statement or show a bit of cleverness, yeah, okay, they work.

But icons are supposed to represent. Images grab the pattern recognition system of the brain faster than words and words faster than abbreviations. And yet these icons arrive at the tail end of this continuum.

The icon designer is supposed to insert an appropriate level of graphical detail into the icon to grab the brains attention via pattern matching. These aren’t pattern matching, they are reading. And, worse, they are reading abbreviations. The angst with these comes because it is frustrating for the brain to have to sit and muddle through the known words to come up with abbreviations, thus by working backwards, to come up with a match for the icon.

In other words, this attempt at recognition becomes a pruning of a word tree, then to abbreviations, then to a match. This is a lot of work. Pattern recognition goes much faster than this.

I do not doubt the difficulty of iconizing a product suite as diverse as Adobe’s. I also do not doubt that this very breadth in potential products makes this recognition process via text even harder.

The work of the icon designer is supposed to be strenuous so that the one person makes the job of recognition easier for thousands.

As someone else has said, the CS2 Adobe icons aren’t so good themselves, but they do at least work in the space of patterns rather than language.

And that’s my $/50

By: db

db — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:16:07 +0000

It’s almost like they threw their hands up and didn’t even try. They made their design brief too big and all encompassing. They decided that all the Adobe/Macromedia Icons needed to be immediately recognizable in 1 second. I don’t agree. They need to take another pass at them before spring.