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. ↩