INTERVIEW: Jim Petersen, Adobe Branding Director, Speaks About Acrobat 9 Design (Page 2)

Macromedia changes everything

The splash screen for Adobe Reader 7. Note the two-dimensional look of the trefoil art compared to the Acrobat 7 box art.

The splash screen for Adobe Reader 8. While the Acrobat 8 box art captured motion and energy, this splash screen is spare and simplistic—a foreshadowing of what was to happen with the CS3 icons.

The 2005 Macromedia merger created what Jim calls a “brand integration exercise,” bringing the Macromedia family of products into the Adobe brand system. The result of the exercise is what Jim calls a “360-degree view of the brand expression,” which manifested itself in the flowing packaging graphics used on CS3. Colors flow and integrate in the same way Adobe’s product families mix and coalesce. At the same time, the “periodic table” icon family materialized, which Jim calls a “mnemonic system.” For a better idea of the family concept communicated by these icons, you have to look at the diagram below of the whole Adobe icon system—again, color is used to tie together product families. I personally feel the color connections in this system aren’t very effective—there are too many connections between products and families to map consistently—but the concept is solid.

The Adobe CS3 icon family. Note the Acrobat icon far in the upper-right.

And on to version nine

The box art for Acrobat 9 Pro. Click to view at a larger size.

The box art for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended. Click to view at a larger size.

The Acrobat 9 packaging is a response to Acrobat’s evolution after the Macromedia merger, and in fact Jim had hoped version 8 branding would be like version 9 but the product cycle timing was not right and they had to use something of an intermediary step for version 8. The end result was a packaging that evolved from version 7 but also was influenced by the Macromedia merger. As Jim says it, “Acrobat version 8 was the first effort by Adobe to evolve the overall Adobe look and feel following the Macromedia acquisition. That included typography, approach to color, as well as the imagery. But we were still evolving the visual language, and didn’t fully incorporate the new look and feel into our product branding until the CS3 launch.”

One of Jim’s major themes with the Adobe branding is “efficiency and simplicity in the user experience,” acknowledging that the best experience can be simple and pure and not complex. One way Adobe has adopted this approach is by refining the panel systems in CS3 applications and segmenting some bloated products to separate all the features (Photoshop Elements, Standard and Extended are great examples). In the same way, Acrobat 9 sports graphics that are cleaner and more streamlined—”richness does not have to come with complexity,” and so the graphics remain flat and simple. I suspect the “broadcast” theme is drawn from Acrobat 9′s new integration with Flash technology, multimedia, and increasing connections through the Acrobat.com Web site.

“Carefully nurtured”

So is this the end of the Acrobat brand’s instability over the past few years? It seems like it would, especially given the Macromedia merger is now well in the past, but talking with Jim made me feel like change is not something he avoids. “We try to evolve from the equities we’ve built in the previous versions while showing something is new and exciting from Adobe,” he said in our interview. He also described a product’s brand as a “living organism that has to be carefully nurtured.” That would suggest the concept of growth and change, which up to now has been based on “how much the marketplace is evolving.” There has been a great deal of change in the industry in the last five years, and that says a lot considering the 20 years before that were the “desktop publishing revolution.” Maybe the next ten years will be a decade of stability, or maybe a decade of even more and greater changes. If that’s the case, I’ll have to stay in touch with Jim because the art on those boxes is going to get very interesting indeed.