JD on EP

Michael Calore at WIRED tells part of why conversation spiked: "You're probably thinking 'An icon? Seriously, this is news?' Well... everything Adobe does is monitored and scrutinized by a fleet of Photoshop junkies and design geeks. So, we figured we'd pass along some more design geekery for you all...."

(I think another motivator here is that, for many people these icons will be a part of their daily visual experience... it's their desktop, their taskbar, their environment in which the applications work. I suspect that another driver is concern over how well the actual merged toolsets will work out, and the icons are just one of the first indicators we have of this.)

Dave Shea had a a similar take on the cosmic importance of small collections of pixels: "I'm sure every industry experiences this: from time to time, controversies brew up that appear to the outside observer as obsessive, myopic navel-gazing. Talking about application icons definitely falls under that banner; as a crime against humanity, it ranks somewhere around the level of accidentally using 1% milk instead of skim in someone’s coffee. There are indeed more important things to worry about in this world. A lot of them. That said...."

Jason Santa Maria followed up with a comment that resonated for me: "'But seriously, this much uproar over application icons?' Because we want greatness from Adobe. We want to stand behind a product that is solid, through and through. Just as Dave says, Adobe has a profound effect on our industry to set the bar. And I shudder at the days we will see people justifying their designs against these...." (more)

Mike Davidson cracked me up with his icon for the new sIFR 3.0.

Matt Thomas describes how it works when colors are difficult to distinguish.

This is my favorite graphic comment of the day, although I think we can get it down to two characters by using "whadda". I also liked the alpha mask lineup.

John Nack pulled over 200 comments in less than 24 hours, and this one particularly made me stop and think: "Oh God! NOOOOOOOO! — 01:34 PM on December 21, 2006 Seriously! Please please please! They are freaking terrible! DO NOT DO THIS ADOBE!