Adobe has made an extreme minimalist (or just plain lazy) decision with their icons for Creative Suite 3.

There’s been some spirited debate about these icons.

From a usability point of view, they’re terrible for colorblind users and not very legible at 16×16 pixels, the most common size for icon viewing, at least on Windows. And I wonder about localization: do these make any sense at all for non-english speaking users? Adobe has quite a challenge in rebranding their Macromedia aquisitions in a consistent way with the Adobe stable of products. What will happen to Freehand? Will GoLive GoAway?

And my opinion? Nobody asked, but I was sure they were placeholders for the Real Thing the first time I saw one of these icons.

And this is the Photoshop CS3 icon at 16×16 pixels.

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Adobe’s CEO announced that within 6 months they’ll be putting an advertising-supported version of Photoshop online. Apparently Adobe wants to compete in the Google space with some of its applications.

No word on which version of Photoshop or what features it may have disabled. I’m betting that in order to keep paying users happy, the online version will have a limited, though usable, set of features. I’m wondering if perhaps Photoshop LE isn’t selling as well as Adobe would like, and this would be a way for Adobe to make money off that product.

Photoshop LE is aimed at home and small business users, and although it shares the same interface as Photoshop, it doesn’t offer the full set of Photoshop tools.

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