One of the sets of tools that I rely upon every day–in every way more so than the likely obvious candidates like Microsoft Word–are some of the Adobe CreativeSuite applications. These include, for me:
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
To a lesser extent, I also use Adobe InDesign when I’m called to create something print-based. As a general rule, I don’t use Adobe Acrobat Pro, unless I’m sitting down to create a PDF-based form.
Someone once asked me “How did you get so proficient at Photoshop?” Well, the types of work I do require me to use it every day. For web-based work, I know it well. As a photography retouching, not nearly as much. It’s a huge tool that has so many uses. But you get better at almost anything by practice and experience.
Since the first “CS” came out, I was not happy with the direction the icons for these applications was going. I still use CS3 (CS4 is the most current version), and with that version came new icons that are represented by letters. I have a big blue square in my OS X dock with the letters ‘Ps’ on them. That’s “Photoshop.” (Why some folks still insist on writing PhotoShop is beyond me, as Adobe has answered the question quite nicely right in the icon, small s.)
So, a very enterprising guy named Mike Hopkins has created his own icon set. People have been making icons for ages it seems, but to me, this is yet another example of the benefits behind the Web, mashup, and collaboration. No one told him to do this. He wasn’t hired by Adobe. He just did it and his solution is (in my opinion) beautiful.
Botticelli’s Venus had become an icon for Adobe Illustrator since its very early versions, and she is beautiful. He has restored her to the iconography for Illustrator. The other thing he did for all the icons was to maintain their signature colors from the CS3 set: green for Dreamweaver, red for Flash, blue for Photoshop. Kudos!