The New Adobe CS3 User Interface

Now that I have installed the new CS3 Design Premium release ver­sion and have actu­ally spent some time work­ing with the new appli­ca­tions, I’m start­ing to under­stand the fuss a lot of peo­ple made and are still mak­ing over the new Adobe user inter­face. Although I was a beta tester, I’ve mainly been using Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS3 because those are the apps I needed to use to work on my cur­rent projects. As you prob­a­bly know by now, nei­ther Fireworks nor Dreamweaver have been updated to the new Adobe UI.

I’ve been work­ing on a new logo for my busi­ness site which will be used to per­form a sort of rebrand­ing of my busi­ness (both online and print col­lat­eral. I’d started the work in Illustrator CS2 and moved to CS3 last week to con­tinue. In the included image, you can see the Illustrator inter­face with the lat­est revi­sion of the logo in a land­scape let­ter sized page at 100%.

In that image you’ll prob­a­bly first notice that the main tool­box is now 1 tall col­umn which saves pre­cious hor­i­zon­tal screen real estate. I have it float­ing over the art­board as this is my pref­er­ence but it comes docked to the left by default. On the right you’ll see a num­ber of pan­els reduced to icons and labels which saves a lot of space and lets you con­cen­trate on the work you’re doing. To the right of that you see the Layers and other pan­els in their “nor­mal” ope­nend stated like you are used to and, on my machine they are actu­ally on my sec­ond mon­i­tor even if you see them in the same image as the main inter­face here.

To be hon­est, at first I was really scep­ti­cal about this new UI and, like many oth­ers, I was wor­ried that it would “break” the Macromedia UI which I gen­er­ally found more effi­cient and ele­gant than the old Adobe UI. But as I use it more and more, what I’ve come to real­ize is that this new UI actu­ally keeps what was best in both the old Macromedia and Adobe approaches. It is more flex­i­ble than the old MM style and solves the pro­lif­er­a­tion of count­less screen space guz­zling palettes in the old Adobe UIs. It looks very pol­ished too but, more impor­tantly, it works very well even if it does require some get­ting used to for an old Macromedia user like me. Even those who have been using pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Adobe appli­ca­tions (also like me) will prob­a­bly need a lit­tle time to find their bear­ings within the new UI.

To me, this new UI is a mar­vel of sophis­ti­ca­tion, ele­gance and effi­ciency and I am now some­what dis­a­pointed that Fireworks and Dreamweaver will have to wait until CS4 o get the same inter­face. Lastly, I have to give the InDesign devel­op­ment team huge kudos for going the extra mile and adding even more sophis­ti­ca­tion to the con­cept by let­ting users add and delete items in the main menus as well as color code items that are used often so they are eas­ier to spot. As I spend more and more time in ID to design the lay­out of my inter­ac­tive PDF tuto­ri­als, I can appre­ci­ate all the extra effort they put in mak­ing ID one of the most sophis­ti­cated pieces of soft­ware I ever tried.