Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition

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This Competition Has Ended and is No Longer Accepting Entries. View the Winning Entries Below.

Winners announced, and icons ready for you to down­load, below.

Foreword

In late December 2006, Adobe revealed a por­tion of its brand­ing scheme for the next gen­er­a­tion of Adobe appli­ca­tions, includ­ing the upcom­ing Creative Suite 3 and all CS3-version point prod­ucts like Photoshop, InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, Adobe Bridge, and Acrobat. Except in a few instances, the brand­ing scheme, which incor­po­rates all the for­mer­ly Macromedia-published prod­ucts, fore­goes the sym­bols and iconog­ra­phy so famil­iar to cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als in favor of color-coded, two-letter sym­bols for each appli­ca­tion (see illustration).

Click the image to zoom to the entire col­or wheel. Adobe’s new prod­uct icons cre­ate a cohe­sive brand­ing scheme based on the col­or wheel.

The brand­ing change has met with pas­sion­ate­ly polar­ized opinions–some adore the new icons, some despise them. Regardless of which side you count your­self among, Quark VS InDesign​.com is giv­ing you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to express your vision of the per­fect Creative Suite 3 appli­ca­tion icons in the Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition.

If you aren’t a fan of the new icons, here’s your chance to make your opin­ion known to Adobe in the lan­guage you speak most fluently–visual design. Even if you love the new CS3 icons, here’s your chance to step into Adobe’s shoes to visu­al­ly explore and quan­ti­fy what the tools of our trade mean to you. Starting from scratch, how would you have designed the icons?

The Quark VS InDesign​.com Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition is a good-natured, fun, and friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion among graph­ic design­ers, illus­tra­tors, user inter­face design­ers, and any­one who enjoys using Adobe prod­ucts to create–professionally or as a hob­by. This con­test is about cel­e­brat­ing our favorite tools and thank­ing Adobe for two decades of cre­at­ing some of the coolest soft­ware that enables us to express our cre­ative passions.

Now that Adobe has shown how it sees Adobe appli­ca­tions, Quark VS InDesign​.com is ask­ing you to show how you see your favorite tools, to com­mu­ni­cate your vision in the unique and chal­leng­ing art form of 128x128-pixel can­vas­es. When all the entries are assem­bled togeth­er on Quark VS InDesign​.com your designs will be among a gallery of voic­es from around the world artic­u­lat­ing in visu­al lan­guage their appre­ci­a­tion for the coolest soft­ware I can imagine.

The Winners and Judging

First Place: Kimberly Smith

Second Place: Danny Dioguardi

Third Place: Vito Zgonik

Judging was accord­ing to the fol­low­ing criteria:

• 30% Originality. Rotating Adobe’s own icons 90-degrees prob­a­bly won’t score big.
• 30% Appropriateness to Subject. In part, we will look for how obvi­ous it is that the icon rep­re­sents the appli­ca­tion it’s sup­posed to. In a dock or but­ton bar, no label will be present, so a user must intu­it which icon belongs to which appli­ca­tion. Part of this cri­te­ri­on will also be eval­u­at­ing the abil­i­ty of the design to retain its integri­ty and recog­ni­tion at typ­i­cal icon sizes–256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 48x48, 32x32, 24x24, and 16x16 pixels.
• 30% Coolness Factor. Any iconophile knows that the appre­ci­a­tion of these tiny works of art is not lim­it­ed to spe­cif­ic styles, palettes, or motifs. It’s about, well, icon cool­ness. Separate from the oth­ers, this cri­te­ri­on will look at how many and how big the oohs and ahhs the designs elic­it, and how fast it makes us want to replace default icons on our own docks and launch bars.
• 10% Number of Application Icons. The min­i­mum eli­gi­ble sub­mis­sion was three (3) icons. Among the var­i­ous edi­tions of Creative Suite 3 and all the non-bundled appli­ca­tions Adobe recent­ly madeover, there were more than three dozen appli­ca­tions that were can­di­dates to have their icons redesigned by entrants. Adobe cre­at­ed a cohe­sive design scheme for their icons, and we looked for entrants to do the same.

With so many cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions of Adobe appli­ca­tion iconog­ra­phy, judg­ing was dif­fi­cult. Between the first and sec­ond place win­ners espe­cial­ly. Kimberly Smith’s excel­lent and instant­ly iden­ti­fi­able object-oriented graph­ics and Danny Dioguardi’s evo­lu­tion of sym­bols from an homage to pre­vi­ous ver­sions through new sym­bols are both beau­ti­ful­ly orig­i­nal, imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fy the appli­ca­tions they describe, and cer­tain­ly meet the cool­ness fac­tor. In the end, judg­ing between them rest­ed on that 10% cri­te­ri­on, the num­ber of appli­ca­tion icons. Kimberly cre­at­ed four more icons than Danny, nudg­ing her into the top spot.

Vito Zgonik, the third place win­ner, pro­duced designs 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. Vito ele­gant­ly incor­po­rat­ed the sym­bols as sub­tle back­ground pat­terns where oth­ers might have been tempt­ed to add loud­er ele­ments to com­pete with the cen­tral let­ters. Two things pre­vent­ed this set of icons from scor­ing high­er in the com­pe­ti­tion: First, the styled F Flash icon broke ranks and retreat­ed into past Macromedia brand­ing instead of hold­ing a cohe­sive aes­thet­ic. Second, the sym­bols Vito used in some of the back­ground pat­terns did­n’t make sense. For instance, grass brush­es are used to rep­re­sent FreeHand and Photoshop. I could under­stand such a sym­bol applied to the vec­tor illus­tra­tion appli­ca­tion FreeHand or to Photoshop, which con­tains the grass brush pat­terns them­selves, but by employ­ing grass for both appli­ca­tion icons, it weak­ened the result for both and looks almost as if the artist ran out of ideas by the time he got around to design­ing the lat­ter of the two. Despite its rel­a­tive­ly minor flaws, the set is beau­ti­ful. I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoy the way it incor­po­rates and updates the pop­u­lar glass-button style.

A cou­ple of sets I received, those by Adam Betts and Anatoliy Omelchenko, were also strong show­ings. At the request of their authors, they were exclud­ed from judg­ing, but have been made avail­able for down­load. Of the two sets not com­pet­ing the design com­pe­ti­tion, Adam Betts’s, which brings the CS3 appli­ca­tion box imagery into the icons and retain­ing the fla­vor of Adobe’s vision, is stun­ning. Among my favorites, how­ev­er, is Anatoliy Omelchenko’s abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Simple in design but instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as har­bin­gers of their respec­tive appli­ca­tions, Anatoliy’s designs are remark­able exam­ples of graph­ic design.

Click here to see the win­ning icon designs and down­load all entries free for use on your computer.

Want to see the incred­i­ble prize chests the win­ners are tak­ing home? Kimberly’s prizes are on the next page, fol­lowed by Danny and Vito. Or, use the links box at the top of this col­umn to jump right to them.

Next: First Place Winnings