The New Adobe's Desktop Brand System
Abobe is coming up with a whole new set of icons for their CS3 series. Bold and totally unconventional. The concept is based on the periodic table as well as the color wheel.
You can check out a 3D carousel of the icons here.
Here's a commentary from Ryan Hicks, Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe explaining the reasons and perspectives on the big change:
My favorite quote from the article would be the last paragraph...
"If we wanted to design a 'Periodic Table of the Elements' we certainly have the capabilities to have done so. Our desktop brand system isn't a marketing or advertising gimmick that we will toss out on the next rev, it's a solution to real usability and identity problems and is something we can call wholly our own."
Personally, I like the concept and the approach Ryan Hicks is taking on. To me it's a strong visual language and if you look around, most icon designers tend to associate visual symbols to objects incoherently. Take for example the photo-realistic icons in Mac OS x. The detail in these icons sometimes serves only to distract the user from data and function controls. Although in some instances it make perfect sense to render objects which people are familiar with, what is the point of similarly rendering unfamiliar objects and abstract concepts (like those butterflies in Photoshop CS and a network)? Ultimately, users must rely on accompanying text to make sense of the icons, unless they are quite frequently used.
