Photoshop has a new logo. No, sorry, I mean Photoshop® has a new® logo™. I saw it on the Adobe page this morning and thought it was a bit of a poor spoof, “This is surely the work of an amateur, as Adobe would never make such a cheap-looking logo.” Unfortunately I was wrong. I saw this article on 30gms, and followed the link to where John Nack, head of product development at Adobe has written about it on his blog, and it’s clear from the comments that most people’s reactions were similar to mine.

The question is, does Photoshop need a logo? If so, does it need anything more than a logotype? A brand-mark like that seems overkill to me, and the addition of the fly-speck TMs and Rs buzzing about it and the putrid dribble of tagline underneath only completes the analogy… of something killed, and left to rot under a bush somewhere.

I just came across “The Ladies Tea” on Swissmiss just now. Like her, I smiled at the logo, which is rather lovely, but couldn’t help but notice the awful kerning on the type. Below I’ve got the original on the left, and a version where I simply retyped the name in Arno Pro on the right. My modified version isn’t perfect, but at least the D-I-E combo isn’t quite so munged.

Yes, I know there’s a missing apostrophe, but putting it in doesn’t help the logo one bit.