Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Replacement Icons
 
 
 

UPDATE: LINKED ON JOHN NACK (SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER FOR ADOBE PHOTOSHOP)'S BLOG.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS WORK-IN-PROGRESS.
THE ICONS ABOVE ARE JUST A SMALL SAMPLE OF A MUCH LARGER SET.
THEY ARE ALSO SIMPLY REPRESENTATIVE AT PRESENT, THEY MAY CHANGE DRASTICALLY, AND STILL NEED TO BE TIDIED UP A FAIR BIT EITHER WAY.

A lot has been said about the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 / CS3 icons, not much of it very nice...
Most people think the new icons are fairly bland, and many people have been looking for replacement icons which they can use instead of Adobe's own, including myself.
What I've discovered in my searches though is that most of the replacement sets seem to still utilise the two-letter "periodic table" theme. In my opinion, this doesn't really solve the original problem, which is not that all the new icons look bland, but that they all look too similar.
There's also a confusing anomaly in that some of the icons don't use a two-letter abbreviation, such as Acrobat or Device Central, and instead use an actual icon / symbol on the square, making these icons stand out from the rest in the suite.

With all this in mind, I set out to create my own set of CS3 replacement icons, with 3 objectives in mind: (i) to make the icons look more interesting, (ii) to make the icons seem like part of the same set and, most importantly, (iii) to make all the icons easily distinguishable from each other.

To make them look more interesting, I adopted the "button" style from the previous Macromedia suite of applications (Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc.), but have used the new CS3 colours. To make the icons look like they actually belong to the same set and also to make them more identifiable, I adopted the symbol approach that Adobe themselves used in their "mismatched" icons, using appropriate icons that represent the application in question.

I hope you like the alternative set of icons that I have come up with.

If you would like to be notified when the complete set of Adobe CS3 replacement icons is available to download, then click here.
Also, please feel free to spread the word and to pass this URL onto other people who you think may be interested in these replacement icons.

Go to my site's front page here.