It seems that i was too optimistic about the new Adobe CS 3 icon before, in other words, i was wrong!! The fact is they are not for temporary purpose, they are really going to use those so-called "simply" icons for the final products! If you dont know what i am talking about, here it is:

     That's right! they will be the final icons for Adobe Creative Suite 3, at least for what they are talking now. unless they change their mind later. According to their dev blog, their goal is "having them work well as a complete system"!

    The question is: are they out of their mind? Two -letter icon?is this all because of the great merge of Adobe and Macromedia, which makes them so hard to work on something unified that they just decided to go over-simplified and take the basic design concept of Macromedia icons and render them using "Unified"gradient? Or do they just want to constantly remind those people who already used their products for years the name of their products? 

    I think the fundamental rule of icon design is its uniqueness and quick recognizability! that means you dont have to go through a serial of brain processes to recognize it! In the past, Adobe changed their product icons a lot, in fact i think they have a heritage of creating a whole new set of icons for each product generation. But the bottom line is that they all worked pretty well in recognizability sense. Because they are all graphic related icons, dont forget that human has a stronger memory sense about graphic than texts. That's why typographic is so widely used and accepted in design industry.   

    Another thing to mention is that: they may not look that ugly in Windows, but they are so not fit-in under Mac OS. If you have a chance to see them sitting with other stunning icons in the Dock, you will get what i mean. I think this applies to all past Adobe icons as well. Come on, squire shape icon? they are so 80's!!!

    Hope they will listen to their customers and make some positive move! 

P.S: This picture reconfirms my suspicious about the absence of ImageReady in the future! But "Fh"? a new Freehand in the coming version? man that's so unexpected!!! why dont they just merge it into Illustrator?