The CS6 Desktop Brand System

Adobe

It takes well over a year to design, execute, deliver, and ensure the proper implementation of the roughly 5,000 or so assets it takes to get a CS release out the door (we’re already thinking about CS7). Along the away, there are innumerable institutional, technological, and political hurdles to overcome. It can be daunting, but we do everything we can to get it made with as few design compromises as possible.

We know that every release requires change and that the change will make some people unhappy. Like many of you, we are life-long users and fans of the tools, and we do our best to create something that we can be proud of, knowing full well that some people will not agree with our choices. Then again, if no one reacts negatively, it’s probably not very interesting.

In this regard, we consider our work for CS6 a success. We achieved our design goals, met the technical requirements, and shipped it more or less in the form we imagined. If you’ve ever done design work for a big company, you will understand why this is cause for celebration.

As we write this, CS6 has just shipped, and the first reactions are starting to appear on the web. Though much of this may be new to you, we’ve been staring at it for more than a year and have come to really love these bright little icons, illustrative splashes, and other elements. We hope you will too.

Goals & Requirements

Whenever we prepare for a Creative Suite release, we start off with a list of technical requirements and design goals. Here’s what we wanted to accomplish from an experience standpoint: read more...