Last month, Adobe started to change the icons for its ever-growing suite of applications. The biggest change was the new colourful Creative Cloud logo, but the applications within the Creative Cloud Suite have been transitioning, too, and not everybody’s happy about it.
Many have noted that the icons are all starting to look the same, with multiple apps sharing the same colour scheme, making it confusing to find the right app. Others are definitely fighting their OCD over differences in font size and inconsistencies in spacing and alignment from one icon to the next, but the overall consensus doesn’t seem to be all that positive.
Thank you @Adobe for basically making all the icons the same colour – super easy to distinguish🙃 pic.twitter.com/NOcdAsA3PF
— Lt. Eddy (@LieutenantEddy) June 22, 2020
Some are (jokingly? or serious?) even refusing to update.
going to go out of my way to ensure i never update my adobe apps now because of this boneheaded icon redesign. who thought it was a good idea to remove the color differences between each program, now it's an indistinguishable mess pic.twitter.com/jh9WZ2Qqiz
— Billy Chitkin (@_gernge) June 16, 2020
Even more confusingly, this has stretched over to their mobile apps, too, with different apps using the exact same icon but in different colours.
Or the same icons w/ different color…
Adobe also change the phone app icons now… pic.twitter.com/doLRYchRvx— 青焼セイ (@enterws) June 19, 2020
Adobe doesn’t seem to be using exactly the same colour for every desktop icon, but they are grouping icons of a particular type by colour. So, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition have the same colour icon. As do Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
Changing the @Adobe CC app icon colors to be so similar after the last update makes them impossible to tell apart at a glance. Audition, After Effects and Animate specifically all appear to be the same color.
Whoever decided this was the way to go should be fired immediately. pic.twitter.com/5dkFj2l0IP
— Nick R. (@nickrobalik) June 25, 2020
And while the colour is frustrating, particularly on a high-resolution screen with tiny icons that you could misclick at a glance, it’s not the only thing that’s upset users.
I wasn't going to comment on the updated Adobe icons … but what the bloody hell is this? WHY are After Effects and Premiere the same colour? WHY is the XD icon bigger than the rest? @Adobe are pioneers of the creative industry producing these remember. pic.twitter.com/Oq1IoID144
— Charlie O'Halloran (@OHLLRN) June 17, 2020
And some have noticed that the mobile app icons don’t even all line up properly, which is going to upset the designer in just about everybody.
…at Adobe and then have something like misaligned text on every icon? Like, no joke, none of your app icons are aligned if you look carefully, y’all should care abt this. Please, if you’re not going to bring the rainbow back, at least align text properly pic.twitter.com/GAnzPWJCx4
— konstantin-🖤 (@fagkosta) June 16, 2020
Some have taken to override the new default icons to go back to their old ones…
Fixed my rainbow of Adobe software icons with manual override through substantial effort but I just realized that the font I happened to have selected makes it look like I wrote "MOTHERFUCHER" on there. Also, the alignment is a bit off now which irritates me only slightly less. pic.twitter.com/Cx67mdfauq
— Heather Coles 🎶🎷🐛✨ (@evilspirals) June 25, 2020
While others have designed their own – which arguably look much better than the new (or old, for that matter) official ones.
I didn't really like the new Adobe Creative Cloud Icons, so I decided to create my own! Let me know what you guys think 💙 pic.twitter.com/D2XyJPlppn
— k4 (@k4dude) June 20, 2020
Although the icon doesn’t change the functionality of the apps, it’s going to take a lot for some designers to get used to who’ve been using the previous icon colour scheme for perhaps a decade or more. Accidentally clicking and loading the wrong app is frustrating, especially for those resource hogs that take forever to load.
What do you think? Do you like the new icons, do you think they should revert to the old ones, or just start over and make a whole new design like K4dude’s?
[via Creative Bloq]
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