Sunday 13 May 2007
Fettuccine Adobe
When Adobe unveiled their newly designed array of “two letter” application icons, I was among the skeptics. All programs are now represented by a coloured box reminiscent of an element in the periodic table. Many argue that this makes them indistinguishable from one another - even more so for anyone with a degree of colour-blindness (doubtless this is less common among the design pros that make up Adobe’s core audience, but still).
After some consideration, though, I don’t think it’ll be any worse than before. I mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve confused the two on occasion because, no matter how different the imagery, they’ve been designed to look like they’re part of an integrated brand identity, which means they feel similar. I think part of my brain saw the “PS7 eye” and “AI10 Venus” and lumped them together under the heading “face”; ditto the “pretty pastel nature imagery” from CS2 (actually tinted x-ray photos). Maybe “Ai” and “Ps” will be a better compromise.
Of course, I’ll have to get used to the colours. I’m not much of a kinaesthete, but “Ai” is clearly bright red as far as I’m concerned… unfortunately, red is the traditional brand colour for Flash. And by rights “ID” (InDesign) ought to be gold or brown. At least they were sensible enough to make “Ps” blue!
But we’ll see, won’t we… It may well be that CS3-style icons work well for some people, and pictorial icons for others. I’d like to see some hard evidence one way or another.
Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was shopping and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a display of colour-coded two-letter packages for, of all things, organic pasta. Red/K for kamut, green/S for spelt, beige/G for durum (grano duro), brown/I for whole wheat (integrale). I can’t find any other images of their new packaging on the web - not even on Felicetti’s site - and I presume it’s a very recent redesign. Was idea-stealin’ involved, or is it just coincidence?
