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Conceptual Packaging - A Creative Type Company

Spotlight: Consumer Electronics/Software

Package Design Breathes New Life Into Branding Strategy For Adobe’s Powerful New Set of Design Tools

Adobe Creative Suite bundles up to six essential Adobe applications for designers.

When Adobe Systems Inc. launched its Creative Suite (CS) product line last September, it not only offered the creative professional an arsenal of publishing tools at an affordable price, but also integrated the applications so that designers could create with all of them using a common interface.

The CS package comes in two versions, Standard ($999) and Premium ($1,229)—both of which are huge bargains compared to purchasing the applications separately. The Standard offering bundles all-new full versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Version Cue file manager. Premium features all of these, plus Adobe’s GoLive and Acrobat 6.0 Professional applications.

According to Adobe, each of the applications in CS has been upgraded, and henceforth all will be on the same revision schedule for greater inter-operability. Photoshop CS replaces Photoshop Version 8.0; Illustrator replaces Illustrator 11; InDesign CS replaces InDesign 3.0; and GoLive CS replaces GoLive 7.0. Acrobat 6.0 is the only application that will keep its current version number for the time being.

“One of the reasons that the CS launch is significant is that it’s the first time in Adobe’s history that all of its products are on the same revision cycle,” says Brett Wickens, executive creative director for MetaDesign, San Francisco. Wickens, who led a team of designers at MetaDesign to create the branding of Adobe’s CS line of products, started working on the package design for Creative Suite last February and received final sign-off on the concept from Adobe in July.

Reinvigorating Link to Designers
“Adobe wanted to reinvigorate its strong ties to the design community,” he says, “and in terms of branding, the company was looking for something revolutionary rather than evolutionary for CS.”

Brand equity was an issue that both Adobe and MetaDesign were concerned with, as Photoshop’s eye image and Illustrator’s Venus visage were icons that designers associated with these two venerable graphic design applications for over a decade.

“I wanted to create a package for the software that a designer would take pride in and want to leave out on display on a desk or a shelf, versus being stored away unseen within a drawer,” Wickens adds. “Having bought just about every piece of graphic design software out there since the late 1980s, there have been very few software boxes that I’ve personally wanted to keep out on display because of their design.”

Wickens says that, conceptually, he and his team chose the theme of nature as the umbrella graphical element for CS’s packaging.

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