At the beginning of this year, I had the fortune to be roped into an epic project re-defining the web presence for Adobe. Within a month, a vision and plan were created, a team was pulled together, I was assigned their manager and leader of design, and the adventure kicked off.

As with the three Creative Suite desktop brand projects, I have a tiny team to lead in creating a ground-up re-imagining of the massive, complex, and cumbersome (HAND BUILT!) half-decade-old site. The challenges are many, we've been handed a limited timeline, and have huge "success" metrics hanging over us. Should be fun...

The base design philosophy came together rapidly; three of us over the course of a week answered to the current site's primary issues. Lack of consistency, coherency, predictability (a stack of identical links all behave differently). A CMS and template-based architecture will ensure "kinds" of pages and their structures will be consistent from section to section.

The major overhead will be in policy changes. The current climate of "everyone can justify an exception" is the opposite of the integrity needed for a coherent user experience. We're one company, and need to start to behave that way. Internally, the current organizations and ownerships were completely disassembled, their dysfunction all too clear in the shoddy customer experience the site presented.