A couple of interesting things during my blogless days:
My girlfriend and I bought a new Macbook for her birthday. (No, it wasn’t my money … although technically it was, except it wasn’t really. Whatever.) We got a brand-new, entry-level model for Php54,000, which is a pretty decent price considering these things go for PhP68,000 at the Power Mac Center. SIDE RANT: I am constantly amazed how these guys can still be in business — let alone thriving — with the kind of price-gouging they pull. There are people out there who believe that Macs really just are expensive, and its places like PMC that help perpetuate this myth.
Anyways, it’s impossible not to appreciate how much Apple has managed to pack into their little starter model. The glossy screen is a real beauty (high-gloss isn’t really something you would recommend for designers due to exaggerated color-saturation, but it sure is purdy-lookin’). And you gotta love the little frills like the built-in webcam and the included Apple remote; at that price range, those things are unheard-of in the PC world.
I’ve been goofing around with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta. It supposedly contains numerous optimizations for the Intel Macs, but I haven’t really been working with anything big enough to stress the hardware or the software all that much. I write about this experience only to say that the new Adobe family logos really bug me:
I mean, I get the whole “Table of Elements” look, but man.
I’m going to avoid using the word “uninspired” here, because I know that this probably went through a veritable royal-rumble of artistic dissonance before being vetted, and I’m trying to be respectful of the countless designers who lost their lives in the process.
The main line-of-thinking here was that Adobe’s product family has doubled in the years since CS2; the Macromedia acquisition has resulted in a Medusa-like mess of applications. I suppose the only way they could standardize the look across the entire line was by stripping everything down to their bare minimums. (My main issue is that once the rest of the applications have been launched, my Dock is gonna be a whole mess of two-letter icons against slightly different color gradients. Not exactly the easiest thing to differentiate, if you know what I mean.)
In case you’re wondering what the rest of logos look like, here’s a largely nonsensical depiction of the whole gamut (pun intended), which I spotted here. For added fun, try looking for Premiere Pro’s icon in there. Yowza.
