Announcing Winners of Contest to Design Alternate Adobe Creative Suite 3 Icons

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Portland, Ore. – 1 May 2007 – Quark VS InDesign​.com (www​.quarkvsin​de​sign​.com), the Authority on the War Between Desktop Publishing Giants QuarkXPress® and Adobe® InDesign®, today announced the win­ners of an open com­pe­ti­tion to redesign the icons for Adobe Creative Suite 3, CS3-version, and oth­er Adobe soft­ware prod­ucts. The con­test was open to graph­ic design­ers, illus­tra­tors, inter­face design­ers, and skin­ners any­where in the world. US$7,000 in soft­ware, books, videos, and ser­vices were award­ed to design­ers of three win­ning entries.

In late 2006, Adobe revealed a por­tion of its brand­ing scheme for the next gen­er­a­tion of Adobe appli­ca­tions, includ­ing the Creative Suite 3 and all CS3-version point prod­ucts like Photoshop, InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, and Acrobat. Except in a few instances, the brand­ing scheme, which incor­po­rates all the for­mer­ly Macromedia-published prod­ucts, fore­goes the sym­bols and iconog­ra­phy famil­iar to cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als from pre­vi­ous ver­sions of the appli­ca­tions of the last 20 years in favor of color-coded, two-letter sym­bols for each appli­ca­tion. The brand­ing change has met with pas­sion­ate­ly polar­ized opinions–some cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als adore the new icons while oth­ers despise them. Without tak­ing sides or express­ing its own opin­ion, Quark VS InDesign​.com cre­at­ed the Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition to give users of Adobe prod­ucts the oppor­tu­ni­ty to express their visions of the per­fect Creative Suite 3 appli­ca­tion icons.

Interpretations of Adobe prod­uct brands com­mu­ni­cat­ed through con­test entrants’ icons var­ied from hand-drawn and clas­si­cal to ultra hip abstract. All entries were cre­ative, visu­al­ly appeal­ing, and pro­fe­sion­al. Selecting three win­ners was a chal­lenge for con­test judge and Quark VS InDesign​.com pub­lish­er, Pariah S. Burke, who said: “They’re all so cool! I want to use all of them myself, but I don’t have enough computers!”

Despite the cal­iber of the entries, three win­ners were ulti­mate­ly chosen.

In First Place with an excit­ing set of object-oriented icons is Kimberly Smith of the United States. Second Place went to Canadian Danny Dioguardi for an evo­lu­tion­ary design scheme that paid homage to ear­li­er ver­sions of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator while incor­po­rat­ing updat­ed, orig­i­nal sym­bols. London’s Vito Zgonik rounds out the trio with a set of nine icons that hold true to Adobe’s CS3 brand­ing scheme by using color-coded squares and two-letter iden­ti­fiers for appli­ca­tions, but return the sym­bols and func­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion lack­ing in Adobe’s icons through ele­gant incor­po­ra­tion of sub­tle back­ground patterns.

The three win­ners will divide a mas­sive prize chest of top soft­ware, videos, ser­vices, and auto­graphed books by top indus­try experts. A com­plete list of prizes award­ed to each win­ner is avail­able on the offi­cial con­test pages on the Quark VS InDesign​.com Website (http://​quarkvsin​de​sign​.com/​s​c​/​c​o​n​t​e​s​t​s​/​2​0​0​7​/​c​s​3​i​c​onred/).

“Winning designs may be viewed on your desk­top, OS X dock, or Windows Start Menu,” said Burke. “Come get them!”

Winning entries, as well as all oth­er icon designs entered into the Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition, are avail­able on the Quark VS InDesign​.com Website as free down­loads. The icons are pro­vid­ed in both Mac- and Windows Vista-compatible PNG for­mat and as Windows XP-compatible ICO files. Included in the high-color ICO files are sev­en com­mon icon sizes rang­ing from 256x256 pix­els down to 16x16 pix­els. Icons may be viewed and down­loaded from: http://​quarkvsin​de​sign​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​a​1​/​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​s​/​2​0​0​7​/​d​o​w​n​l​o​a​d​-​c​s​3​-​r​e​p​l​a​c​e​m​e​n​t​-​icons/

About Quark VS InDesign​.com

Every day mil­lions of design and pro­duc­tion per­son­nel the world over pro­duce tens of mil­lions of pages of news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, books, adver­tise­ments, and oth­er print­ed mate­r­i­al in page lay­out soft­ware; that work is done almost exclu­sive­ly in InDesign or QuarkXPress. Historically, the graph­ics com­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­tries have not long tol­er­at­ed two equal appli­ca­tions for the same tasks, opt­ing instead to stan­dard­ize on one. With bil­lion dol­lar empires stand­ing on either Quark or InDesign, a rival­ry as bit­ter and leg­endary as the Hatfields and the McCoys, the world’s unblink­ing eye scru­ti­nizes their every clash.

Quark VS InDesign​.com (www​.quarkvsin​de​sign​.com) is the author­i­ta­tive cor­re­spon­dent in this bloody war, chron­i­cling every sal­vo of each bat­tle between entrenched pub­lish­ing work­horse QuarkXPress, which ruled unchal­lenged for over a decade, and InDesign, the nim­ble new­com­er built by the com­pa­ny that pio­neered desk­top pub­lish­ing and devel­oped every oth­er stan­dard appli­ca­tion in the print design­er’s tool belt, Adobe Systems, Inc.

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Contacts

For addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion please contact:

Quark VS InDesign​.com
Publisher
Pariah S. Burke, 503–422-7499
e‑mail
www​.quarkvsin​de​sign​.com

Logos, Related Imagery, and Alternate Release Formats

Members of the press may down­load addi­tion­al resources and doc­u­ments relat­ed to this press release.

Quark VS InDesign​.com logos:
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This press release on the Web:
http://​quarkvsin​de​sign​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​a​1​/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​0​7​/​a​n​n​o​u​n​c​i​n​g​w​i​n​n​e​r​s​-​o​f​-​c​o​n​t​e​s​t​-​t​o​-​d​e​s​i​g​n​-​a​l​t​e​r​n​a​t​e​-​a​d​o​b​e​-​c​r​e​a​t​i​v​e​-​s​u​i​t​e​-​3​-​icons/

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