The Acrobat 6 Professional splash screen was one of the last appearances of Acrobat’s “running man.”

The box art for Acrobat 5.0.

The box art for Acrobat 7.0 Professional. Note the move from the “running man” to an abstraction of the PDF trefoil.

The box art for Acrobat 7.0 Standard.

The box art for Acrobat 8.0 Professional.

As designers, we’re very sensitive to the branding experiences out in today’s world and we notice when a product is rebranded. Over the past few years [1] Adobe’s Creative Suite applications have had major branding revisions (first with CS in 2003, and again with CS3 in 2007) and these have attracted attention from designers and branding experts alike, with mixed responses both positive and negative. There’s parts of the CS3 branding that I like and others I don’t, but what has struck me over the past few years is not the Creative Suite rebranding but the branding for [2] Acrobat—little Acrobat, the application that seems to march to its own drummer, doesn’t match the Creative Suite product cycle and caters to more than just creative professionals.

The running man and the trefoil

Longtime Acrobat users will remember the “running man” graphic that graced most early versions of Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat’s “running man” was probably as recognizable as Photoshop’s old eye icon or Illustrator’s Venus icon, which were also used over the course of many versions of those applications. In January 2005 Adobe released Acrobat 7.0, which dropped the “running man” in favor of a very cool three-dimensional abstract graphic based on the PDF “trefoil,” the ubiquitous three-pointed swoosh that graces the PDF file icon. At this time Adobe introduced the Acrobat product family (Professional, Standard, Elements, 3D) and gave each product its own variation of the abstract trefoil packaging. I liked this.

Acrobat 8.0 came out in November 2006 and sported another kind of trefoil graphic, this one seeming to convey motion and not dimensionality. As with the previous version, Acrobat 8 had multiple products in its family and each sported its own variation of the “motion” trefoil. I wasn’t used to seeing three distinct packaging designs over the course of three versions of one Adobe product, but I figured this would be the end of it. And now Acrobat 9.0 is shipping with yet another redesigned package—this one not really based on the trefoil at all but more of an airwave/broadcast motif.

So what gives? When I see this kind of indecision in a brand, it makes me think something’s not right—like there’s a struggle behind the scenes between multiple creative ideas, or something more damaging like [3] Quark’s rebranding and subsequent re-rebranding a couple years ago. Rather than speculate I went straight to [4] Jim Petersen, Director of Brand Strategy and Design at Adobe Systems. I have to hand it to Adobe: they are always very willing to share and discuss the thought processes that go into all their products.

Findings

Here are the main points I gathered from our interview:

Adobe seems to think about branding a little differently. Jim repeated a few times the notion of the Adobe brand serving as a “foundation” or an “enabling brand” to allow customers to “connect despite clutter and make engaging experiences” for their audiences. I think many companies think of their product brands as guideposts to steer consumers to the right purchase—twentysomethings buy X, fiftysomethings buy Y, women buy Z. But I think Jim was thinking about the Adobe product brands selling not just the products themselves, but the means to create those creative, engaging experiences we strive to create. A major function of branding in this case is to help customers choose what’s right for them.

The icon for Adobe Reader 8 sports the PDF trefoil.

So what does this mean for Acrobat? Well, my hypothesis is that Adobe sells PDF, not Acrobat. I learned from Jim that the “running man” icon was retired because research showed that consumers considered the PDF trefoil to be the true icon of the whole PDF/Acrobat technology. That was the major impetus behind the rebranding of version 7. Color was also added to the packaging in order to classify all the new Acrobat products in the family. This was also the first version of Acrobat that had the white background, since CS had just adopted [5] the “white box” branding style. The shared white branding element brought the two products together and gave them a “family flavor” that has since expanded with CS3.

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 [6] 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

[7]

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

[8]

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 ([9] Photoshop Elements, [10] Standard and [11] 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.