Adobe CS4
User experience specialist, identity strategy, art direction, icon design, screen design, design, production: Ryan Hicks.
Contributors – project management, production coordination: Bob Murata. Design and production help: Mike Levin. Honorable mention for his contribution in the wake of dysfunction: Tom Hobbs.
CS4 management, creative direction, political air-cover: Josh Ulm, Michael Gough. Adobe Type team: David Lemon, Robert Slimbach.
Contributors – project management, production coordination: Bob Murata. Design and production help: Mike Levin. Honorable mention for his contribution in the wake of dysfunction: Tom Hobbs.
CS4 management, creative direction, political air-cover: Josh Ulm, Michael Gough. Adobe Type team: David Lemon, Robert Slimbach.
CS4 updated and refined the controversial desktop system introduced for the Macromedia-enriched Adobe CS3. Improvements to the ever-growing system were many - sharper, crisper, brighter - but this release also marked the quiet yet confident introduction of what would become Adobe's new corporate typeface, Clean.The CS4 project faced a whole host of genuine brand experience quandries: Adobe's engineers and product teams created a bunch of new apps with varying relations to existing ones and we are starting to get into trying to understand what hosted services and online destinations mean to brand as well.
Every new product (or service, or destination) requires a unique desktop identity, one which families with an appropriate slice of our desktop brand system, gets through legal clearance, and navigates the spiraling discussions with developers and engineers and marketing managers. Also for CS4 we revisited a number of the graphics that were redesigned for CS3, as well as added a bunch of new ones. We needed to expand the drawings of each icon to include Apple's giant 512px icon size - for a total of six separate illustrations each. CS4's document, package and folder figures were further evolved from CS3, and we added a new "book" base form.
Primary color assignments were adjusted to accommodate more products and the relative contrast of the new translucent-dark-type treatment.
Desktop product identity graphics for approximately 100 products, several thousand individual assets in ico, icns, bmp, png, jpg, gif formats of varying specification.
New Product Marks (not including typographic mnemonics)
Forms
Figures
All these icons were drawn at five sizes to accommodate our supported platforms, which for CS3 included Vista and its new 256px icons.
What did we do next? Adobe CS5 Desktop >>
Every new product (or service, or destination) requires a unique desktop identity, one which families with an appropriate slice of our desktop brand system, gets through legal clearance, and navigates the spiraling discussions with developers and engineers and marketing managers. Also for CS4 we revisited a number of the graphics that were redesigned for CS3, as well as added a bunch of new ones. We needed to expand the drawings of each icon to include Apple's giant 512px icon size - for a total of six separate illustrations each. CS4's document, package and folder figures were further evolved from CS3, and we added a new "book" base form.
Primary color assignments were adjusted to accommodate more products and the relative contrast of the new translucent-dark-type treatment.
Desktop product identity graphics for approximately 100 products, several thousand individual assets in ico, icns, bmp, png, jpg, gif formats of varying specification.
New Product Marks (not including typographic mnemonics)
Forms
Figures
All these icons were drawn at five sizes to accommodate our supported platforms, which for CS3 included Vista and its new 256px icons.
What did we do next? Adobe CS5 Desktop >>