Any that are pickled! :P

No, but I have used it in the past. As a designer working for a company that makes design tools, its important to familiarize yourself with all sorts of tools.

Good question! Strategically, we have a history of not aligning internal org branding to that of our products. The org isn’t meant to be viewed or related to in the same way as our products, and it would be confusing if we were to align ourselves to the look and feel of a product. Also the nature of Adobe Design is to be a centralized org where the people here work across all of our products and services at Adobe. That said, there are certain elements of the new design language that still draw from the overall style at Adobe, such as the use of high-contrast gradients and the Adobe Clean typeface. I’ll also add here that Adobe Design has had its own 10+ year history and evolution of its branding, and this recent rebrand drew heavily from an existing design language that was already in place in terms of the color palette and visual system.

Hi Thomas, Good question here! There’s a couple ways to break this down. First, the areas that you’re speaking to are all the components that make up that capital “B” type of Brand that users interact with. A Brand is everything from the UI and how features are presented, to the look of the branding, and extends on to the marketing, etc. My team is responsible for the visual execution of the branding: creating the visual system for product logos and app icons, splash screens, and any other associated assets that appear across desktop, mobile and web. Another team works on the UI & frameworks, and product teams work on bringing in features.

I actually think that our visual branding is pretty consistent now. Before Creative Cloud launched however, we were changing the visual brand system pretty much every year with each new suite release. Making big branding moves frequently across so many products isn’t sustainable and can lead to confusion, for sure. With the launch of Creative Cloud, one of the first things my team did was decided on a style for the product logos, create a strict rule system around that, and stick to it.

As for the UI and features, one of the biggest efforts going on at Adobe right now is to unify the UI language across all our products. We have some super smart & talented designers and engineers working on this. Some of which has already started to roll out and you’ll see in other products soon too.

The challenge of unifying Adobe’s brand doesn’t just come from number of products. It also comes from the rate of change with them and the fact they are interconnected. The tech industry in nimble. Adobe is no different. Strategy pivots frequently. New products are developed, existing products are rebranded, and taken off the market all the time. Building a trusted brand and constant change are two ideas that can be at odds. We have needed to develop a system that can withstand all of that change and still feel cohesive. Everything we design, we do with the whole system in mind.

Making products feel current poses another challenge. Logistically, chasing trends for high level branding isn’t realistic. Changing 100+ interconnected products with different release cycles, goals, and keeping everything unified is a tall order. Instead we’ve tried to create timeless logos, and change certain other implementations incrementally.

When I first started here, the bubbly, web 2.0 aesthetic was all the rage. We got a lot of criticism for bucking that trend. Now look at the industry. It ended up where we were. I’m not saying everyone followed us. What I am saying is that by definition trends change. What’s feels current now, might not next year. You need to build design principles based on broad business needs, not just on what’s hip.

I agree. Considering 'timeless' is supposed to be one of the corner stones of a successful brand. Many companies are jumping on trends that are already starting to look dated.

Hi Nicholas! Great question. And thank you for the positive feedback on our Bechance post! I do agree that the gradient trend in design has probably been played out a bit in the last year or so. For us, it was never a question of a trend, because gradients and color itself have been an integral part of our brand language and system. Our product icons are organized around the visual system of the color spectrum, and gradients have been a natural extension of that design language for a long time (each of our icons even have a slight gradient of their own). In fact, I remember when I mentioned to a designer friend of mine that I was going to be joining Adobe, his first remark was: “You’re going to get really good at making gradients,” and he was absolutely right! Other companies may be jumping on the bandwagon of gradients these days, but for us it’s very much baked into our DNA as a brand.

Thanks Vishal! In terms of handling feedback, our team (and greater org in general) is all about designing in the open. We all work in shared Dropbox folders so that anyone on the team can open someone else’s file and a take a look at what they’ve been working on, and this level of transparency in the way we collaborate can yield really great results.

In fact, one of the more helpful comments we had gotten during the design process came from someone outside of our team who had happened to walk by my desk one day and pointed out something that I hadn’t noticed before. One of the earlier versions of the current logo had three pixels stacked up as the spine of the “D” but weren’t joined to the rest of the letterform. It had been a version that I was working on a for a while, but couldn’t figure out what wasn’t quite right about it. Our co-worker said, “This doesn’t read as a “D” anymore. It looks more like the letter “U” flipped on it’s side swallowing three pixels.” And then it was at that moment where it clicked into place, and I was able to refine the logo and arrive at the solution shortly after. When you design in the open, people outside can spot things you can’t see because you’ve been so knee-deep in the process for so long.

As for the second question on research methods, there was definitely an initial stage of looking for inspiration on the internet (Pinterest, the work of other studios, etc.). But to be honest, I dove pretty quickly into sketching and just getting my hands dirty. If there’s anything I’ve learned about the design process, is that sometimes you just have to MAKE STUFF (a ton of it—both good and bad) in the beginning and allow yourself to play. From there, you can start to edit back and pick out what’s working and not. I’m really lucky that I’m a part of a team that embraces this way of working and allows for this much freedom and flexibility in the design process. Sometimes you get caught spinning your wheels for several days, but that’s when the periodic critiques really help put you back on track and headed in a direction again.

That’s a really good question. Sounds like you’ve spent some time doing design work in the real world.

First and foremost, I’d point out that Sonja, Sam, and I have been together as a team for six years (Anny came on board about a year ago and has been such an awesome addition). When it comes to the aspects of the job that involve building coalition and trust, selling, and shipping design, it’s impossible to overstate the efficiencies that result from having a group of people spend that much time iterating on a single set of problems.

Over the years, we’ve built a fantastic partnership with our Brand Strategy team (with whom we work hand-in-hand), earned trust with the senior leadership of the company, and gained a strong network of support, overall. We've also learned what it takes to make a lasting and extensible brand architecture that can fit so many varied products and services within it.

All of those structures and relationships took countless hours of investment but they’ve paid immense dividends in the end. The kind of politics you’re referring to used to take up a lot of our time, but now is a small and slowly shrinking minority. There are still disagreements from time-to-time, but the overall alignment we have (visually, philosophically, and politically) on issues of brand limit the range of possibilities, so it’s normally smaller issues we have to grapple with these days.

But that doesn’t mean we spend the majority of our time doing the execution end of the job, either. Despite our best efforts to build a system that is extensible and timeless, the truth is that Adobe is a big, fast-moving company. Adobe is not afraid to try new things and sometimes those new things don’t fit neatly into the tidy system we’ve created. So we do spend a lot of time dealing with the strategy end of things, which involves a lot of email, meetings, research, and other tasks that don’t involve laying down pixels.

Hey Jacob— I'm sure you've figured this out by now, but we're not the team working on the Adobe product called Xd (Experience Design). That very confusion was one of the driving factors in our decision to change the name of our organization form XD to Adobe Design.

That said, we are SO excited about the amazing work that team is doing. You can contact them on Twitter at @AdobeXD.

Great question! One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is creating a system that can withstand nearly constant changes. Adobe’s brand consists of over 100 interconnected products. What those products are and how they are positioned is always in flux. In the past five years, Adobe has made massive business shift with the move to Creative Cloud, developed the Marketing Cloud, experimented with numerous mobile apps, and much much more.

We needed to develop a brand system that can withstand all those changes and whatever changes come in the future. We do this by designing holistically, with the entire ecosystem in mind.

We stay in sync by working together closely and staying in constant contact with other relevant teams at Adobe.

I’d also say that after creating the system, the biggest challenge is protecting the system. The funny thing we found about consistency is that once you have it, there is often appetite to then change it. An important part of the work we do now is outreach and educating teams about the brand system and the equity that comes with aligning to it.

Hi Robert, Features are being added to Adobe XD based feedback here: https://adobexd.uservoice.com/