that was the point, whether or not it makes sense, I don't know. I do know that I found the Macromedia icons for Flash and Dreamweaver easily recognizable and useful, while the CS2 ones were vague (although pretty). My hunch is that these new icons will work for you, even if you don't think they're creative.

Are they groundbreaking design? No... any of us could have come up with these. But that fact could be what makes them work!

I don't need my icons to be avant garde... i need them to instantly communicate. And as Adobe's line of products grows ever more extensive, I am having a hard time keeping all the little pictures straight. I constantly find myself having to think twice about what icon I am clicking on. Lately, InDesign & Bridge always trip me up, and invariably I click on the wrong one. And I have been a Butterfly -- I mean, InDesign -- user since day one!

When I need to edit a photo, I am not thinking "feather". I am thinking, "Photoshop." So I feel the abbreviations will match up easily with the emphasized consonants in the program title, and I will be able to find and click on the right program icon without missing a beat.

And I kind of like the periodic table connection... communicates that design, creativity are elemental.

In the end, they are just icons... I have better things to worry about. Like how to get the non-profit I work for to find the money needed to BUY the programs with the much maligned icons! Come on folks, let's get some perspective!

Logos. Icons. Always a tough assignment. You can bet that someone in the Nike boardroom was saying, "Come on guys, it's a check mark!"

I don't like the new icons and the more I look at them, I feel like I'm looking at a periodic table or old micro chips. But on a positive note, the new icon concept is cool for one thing: When I'm sitting in front of my computer trying to figure out the best way to do something, I can entertain myself by arranging all of the adobe toolbar icons by color theory!

The whole point of Icons, surely is that they are immediately recognisable! The Alphabetic Icons have no easily identifiable application.
They could be for a children's book or blocks.
Certainly they are colourful but within such close proximity they do not stand out from each other. I can imagine that they would be hell on wheels to try and remember!

I would have to say that I'm very disappointed. It makes me wonder if there was too much to do and they had to cut something and the marketing was what suffered. Untimately it is the quality of the application that counts but that aside especially for those of us who design creativity is King.

I agree with those who say that the choice of imagery for the old icons was baffling, to say the least (why the butterfly? especially). However, this is just jumping to the other extreme. Minimalism is ok by me, but why not make the design and typography interesting? These icons are terribly depressing. And it's not as if the products are cheap. We are designers â€" the packaging is important.

I never got used to the feather, butterfly, etc., so I looked for the name to appear on the app. The initials are easier to recognize, but even Office icons have some artistic value.

Can author provide update with Key and sample dock? We could use a key as I could only decipher 11 of the icons.

More importantly, it would be helpful to see 3 or more mocked up docks representing what a graphic designer, a web designer, and a web technician (Coldfusion etc.) would typically see respectively. Add a few apps for a multipurpose user as well.

I plan to try a mock dock regardless.

I think if only Adobe adopts this convention that it will work well. They put typical apps for a person in one area at complementary positions on the color wheel--eg Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign are very different colors.

It would be interesting to see rounded corners for web apps so that folks that are both print and web designers will have one addtional clue besides color for recognition of icons.

Finally, while icons should work at the outset of introduction, they are also what you make of them over time. The first use of nature illustrations were only pretty and not functional. They only became functional (marginally, I would argue) over time.

To the comment on "using letters means you stop and read, which takes time" (paraphrased) -- Perceptual research tells us that we see shapes of words, not so much the letters. In these icons we will have quicker recognition not slower, with only two letters-- it will improve with use just as the nature icons did.

I just think these will work better at the outset and will work even better than the nature icons with continued usage.

I think they look terrible

C'mon folks, they're just icons. Remember icons are supposed to be simple in appearance. It's the pedigree and functionality of the software that truly matters.

I hate them - they're horrible! It DOES look like a periodic table! The lack of clever design reminds me of uncreative Mr. PC from the Mac commercials. How are they supposed to sellling a "creative suite" if the icons say "uh... no creative ideas here!"

I love them - should make my desktop look like a periodic chart - I think it is a very clean look - I already look for my apps by color - this is perfect.

I feel like I'm back in my high school chemistry class struggling to remember what letters stand for what... doesn't Br stand for Bromine?

Have Adobe turned into a chemical industry? Anyway the colourwheel strongly makes me think of my teenager studies chemical chart... Maybe that's on purpose, but for a so-called "creative" suite, I don't see the point. Nothing's less creative than chemistry to me...

When I saw them I instantly saw them as emulating the periodic table - and how the allegory of these 'elements' being used individually or grouped to produce our projects. The periodic table represents the building blocks of everything on an atomic scale - it is also a very good design for communicating a lot of complex ideas.

Did you take a look at the Mac OS X dock?
The Ps and Br (BETA VERSIONS of CS3) stand out easily.
During all those years icons have become more sophisticated and complex, but if you have a lot of Apps open the dock becomes a colorful and confusing mess. Those are easy to spot.
In Windows (I use them as well) the tabs in toolbar they have text that you cannot really read if you have a lot open and the icons are easy to spot there too. I also use the Objectdock in Windows, a utility that behaves similar and can look the same as the Mac OS X dock. Are they pretty? I am neutral about their look. I believe a symmetrical but colored differently line of icons in the dock will be very practical with their lettering distinction, and pretty as well(but that remains to be seen when the whole suite comes out).

I can guess that who ever designed these new icons must have a concept, though i really don't get it... These are the most wonderfull softwares why diminish them with these terrible simple icons? Please let me know what they were thinking (the concept they followed) THXS

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of the OS platform these comments are being submitted from. These icons would look right at home in Windows where everything looks the same, but can you imagine what a nightmare it would be if every app adopted this as their philosophy? I would have a dock full of little square boxes some with the same two letters. Sorry a box with two letters is not an icon unless you are only dealing with a few apps like Adobe. I agree that feathers and butterflys have nothing to do with the programs they represent and they took a while to get used to, but that is what we have learned over the past few years to deal with and when I see a butterly now I see InDesign, etc. I could even distinguish dissimilar butterflys with different programs if necessary, but as always - a picture is worth a 1000 words and a true icon is worth 1000 boxes filled with letters.

Too many times in design the best solution is overlooked because it is simple. Case in point: an evolved logo. Google any corporation for their logos past and present (Ford, Starbuck's, AT&T) for a lesson in how "simple" wins the iconic race.

It is possible when Adobe created Illustrator in the dark ages of the late 80's they did not anticipate a suite of products whose icons would later be represented in a line up of tiny graphics at the bottom of our screens. It will be a nice change... until they change them again.

The trend of opinion, predictably, is that these are horribly uncreative icons to be used on a creative suite. People--they're ICONS! They are, first and foremost, pointers. The last two icon iterations, while beautiful and certainly creative, never worked well for me. FWIW, I'm a left-handed illustrator/designer, presumably one of the usual "creative" suspects. The picture icons, to this day, make me stop before I click because if I don't mentally sort them, I might wind up in the wrong app. They never got internalized--I guess because there's no strong pre-existing symbolic association. Also, I think people are looking at the large images linked to the article, rather than at small images crowded among a diversity of other eye-sugarplums in a dock or desktop or whatever. Adobe aren't stupid. These icons are about esthetics in the context of usability. That said, I don't kow how well I'll really like 'em until I've test-driven them for a while.

They look like science and if I wanted a science career, I would have chosen that path. As a graphic designer, these icons are insulting to my design sense. Keep the old ones, at least we know what they are.
I chose neutral because it is not clear which way means that I hate the new icons.

those icons strike me as similar to the graphics used on any standard Periodic Table of the Elements. Perhaps this is Adobe's way of saying everything in the visual world is composed of these elemental apps in the Creative Suite?

I can see that Adobe is trying to say their software are "elements" or basic building blocks. The icons float on a colour wheel, to conyey them as colour swatches which will combine to form a kaleidescope of amazing works of art. Grouping software by media family within the same hue on the colour wheel is a smart move.

I'm a believer that 'less is more' and clean design is effective design. When I look at my row of icons on my Genie dock, I can never remember which is Photoshop and which is Illustrator until I look at the titles above them. (And I've been using these software daily for years!) By contrast, I can easily find Dreamweaver and Flash. Simplistic, yet easily identifiable.

However, I do agree that the new icons are boring and don't have a creative edge. They lack pizazz. Adobe (the Designer) could have taken a few more design steps and still kept the overall concepts intact.

I can only hope that the animations and visuals for the software launch sequences will be awe-inspiring. Or take the next few months to develop the icons further. Give us something to salivate over!

You should not have to learn an icon. An icon, by definition, is a pictorial representation of its subject.

What is the point of an icon that has no relationship to its subject? Feather? Flower? Butterfly? Seashell? How are we supposed to relate these to their the programs they represent? It's form over function.

As you can probably guess I really dislike the last batch of Adobe icons. ;)

While I'm not hot on the latest at least they are a step in the right direction. But I think they should go back to the older ones.