Have you seen the new Adobe *logo*? It appears in promotional videos introducing Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator with generative artificial intelligence, and it looks more luscious than a doughnut at a gluten-free convention.
Instead of using the classic red “A” graphic mark that Adobe users know from the company’s arsenal of creative tools, the videos show a new design: A sleek, slanting “A” that precedes the letters “dobe,” which are set in a bold typeface. It looks so cool that I thought Adobe had at last updated its brand.
Except, well, it’s not the new Adobe logo. According to Heather Combs, Adobe’s head of brand strategy and customer insights, it’s not a logo at all. Rather, she says, it’s a wordmark. “It’s not replacing the logo; it’s just a new expression in the way that we are creating the way our brand shows up in the world,” she says.
Combs popped my happy bubble over a video chat last week, after I inquired about the new look, casually (and hopefully) asking if this was the dawn of a new branding era at Adobe. Combs emphatically told me that this glorious new mark, seen across Adobe promotional videos, is not a logo; it’s simply a new part of its brand tool kit. “We’ve had a logo for a long time. A beautiful logo, which is still our logo moving forward. We’ve just added a new piece to the tool kit so we can express the brand in multiple ways,” she says.
Combs is referring to the corporate logo that illustrator Marva Warnock (wife of the company’s cofounder John Warnock), designed in 1982 for Adobe’s launch. Warnock’s design featured a slanted “A” whose crossbar formed an open triangle. Though Adobe updated Warnock’s design in 1990 to the red, white, and black logo still used today, the company has had a shockingly consistent visual language from its earliest days. Which is why a new logo would have been so exciting.
Combs’ distinction between logo and wordmark rests on intention. A wordmark can be a logo. Just look at Coca-Cola, Google, and FedEx—designs that are made with letters set in a typeface. A logo—a term that comes from Greek for “word”—is generally understood by most humans to be anything that represents a brand. That can be a graphic mark (Apple’s bitten apple), a logotype (IBM), or a combination of both, sometimes called a graphical logo (Nike, Target, and Unilever).
In the case of Adobe, this wordmark isn’t the official corporate logo, and therefore, by the rules of corporate branding 101, it cannot be considered a logo at all. Combs says the company toyed with its new design at last year’s Adobe Max conference, but there weren’t any “hard rollouts.” Not until these new generative AI promo videos, that is. It’s really a shame because this design is better than any logo refresh I can think of in recent memory.
The new Adobe wordmark is modern and futuristic, yet it looks so classic that it could have easily been Adobe’s first logo from the ’80s. Just look at the perfect way the classic “A” mark integrates with the “dobe” set in a heavy weight of the Adobe Clean typeface.
“We felt that we were missing a bit of a bolder version of Adobe Clean,” Combs explains. This led Adobe’s typography team to craft a new version that was bolder and took up “a bit more presence,” as Combs describes it. As a result of this exercise, Combs says they are “also looking at the weight of the corporate mark as well.” It seems like the right move because, right now, the official “Adobe” feels rather anaemic and more boring than beige.
Even though it’s not a logo, the new mark does feel like it’s coming at a pivotal time for the company as it enters its AI era. When I asked Combs if this wordmark was the herald of the new generative AI Adobe, she deflected, saying that while she could see different places where they would use the mark, she won’t confirm it as a mascot for Adobe’s generative-AI tools.
Still, she concedes: “With what we were doing around generative AI and Firefly, we wanted to be more on the edge. And I think we see the wordmark as being a very fresh, bold kind of way to express the brand. Again, not in replacement of the corporate mark, but a really interesting and intriguing way to express the brand.”
When I told her that the wordmark is awesome and perhaps it would confuse people who might mistake it as a new official logo, she says she doesn’t believe that’s the case. “Our objective is to put the Adobe brand in people’s mouths to make them think about us and want to talk about us,” she says. “If this new wordmark creates a point of interest, then it’s doing its job.”
Combs insists that Adobe has no plans to quietly swap its current logo to the new wordmark. She believes its merits are clear. “It’s not broken. Our corporate mark is widely recognized. It is something a lot of people see and feel very positive things about. And I want to continue to sort of build off of that,” she says. Though, she does admit, the wordmark is a bit more scalable to social and places where the current Adobe logo can feel a bit cramped. “This wordmark gives us a bit more of a compact way to express the brand,” she says.
Exactly! Combine that with the cool factor, the classic look, and the obvious tie into the new generative AI era, and you’ve got a rock-solid case to evolve the corporate brand. As an Adobe fan since Photoshop version 2, I sure hope that happens.