(Before I get into this: yes, I did use Photoshop to prepare this demonstration. I really like Photoshop CS3, but you still have to call a spade a spade.)

When I downloaded the beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 a couple of days ago, what I noticed first wasn’t the improved speed, the new palette locations, or some feature upgrades. Nope; the first thing I noticed was the icon: a sharp, simple, blue-gradient-filled box with a couple of letters on it, which might as well mean Postscript or PlayStation:

Gone was the feather. Gone, apparently, was a sense of style. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one curious about this. However, unlike these folks, I just silently assumed this was a placeholder icon, and stopped thinking about it. I mean, c’mon: I’m not a designer, but if I created a portion of one of our webapps’ interfaces with these types of icons as menu choices, my boss would tell me to get back to the drawing board.

Well, turns out it isn’t.

Wow. Apparently, others also thought these were placeholder icons and have started questioning Adobe. Reaction has generally been quite unkind. I haven’t seen this much vitriol over an icon since BBEdit brought Comic Sans back.

I won’t rehash any of the arguments made against these icons – they’re all good ones. But one think I don’t quite understand is all the shouting about how these icons look at small sizes.

Yeah, that’s not good – but I think they’re equally as bad at large sizes. As a Mac user, with a 1600×1080 desktop, it wouldn’t be out of the question for me to bump up the size of my desktiop icons, and just throw a few of my most frequently used apps out there, for easy access. Well, with these new icons, let’s just take a look at how that might look:

See what I’m getting at? Quick – pick the two sorest thumbs.

Look. I get the periodic table. But, when viewing what’s been produced (along with the fact that Adobe hasn’t even made this shift to all of their applications – check out Acrobat and some other icons I can’t decipher – that explanation starts to sound more like a college student who stayed out all night partying, hit the word processor with minutes to spare, and whipped off something slapdash, and then just as quickly created a half-assed reason for it.

Time to hit the books, Adobe.