I’ve been trying to refrain from com­ment­ing on the new Adobe Pho­to­shop logo because it seems that every­body else already has:

• Pho­to­shop gets a new logo (com­ments)
• See What’s Pos­si­ble
• Pho­to­shop 2.0: The Wrong Kind of 2.0

The first three things that came to my mind when I saw the new logo were:

1. Ew
2. Microsoft
3. This is a joke right?

Noth­ing very ground­break­ing there. I haven’t read of a single person liking it, and many have also pointed out how sim­i­lar it looks Microsoft designs. While I thought Microsoft in the back of my head, I didn’t actu­ally bother to go look at any Microsoft stuff to com­pare. That is…until Armin Vit linked to one for comparison.

Yikes. I decided to go back to the Pho­to­shop web­site for some fur­ther com­par­i­son. As it turns out, there’s some very lovely¹ Microsoft-​esque mar­ket­ing videos. The thing that really caught my eye was the whole sil­hou­et­ted people con­cept. It reminded me of something…oh wait! I know! People_Ready!

I just don’t get what Adobe is trying to achieve here (other than cheap­en­ing their brand)². It seems like just a couple of months ago that Adobe went through that whole CS3 re-​branding thing. While I don’t think that it was 100% suc­cess­ful, at least it did unify the suite in a unique way. Those little color bricks have grown on me, although I still have an awfully hard time telling which one is which. The only one I can remem­ber is that Dreamweaver is green, but then again…Dreamweaver has always been green. Anyway, enough said on my part. Read Armin Vit’s arti­cle for a more artic­u­late analysis.’

1. Insert sar­casm here.↩
2. One could at least hope for a dras­tic price cut to follow. ↩