New Adobe Site Design TERRIBLE
The new Adobe site design is terrible. I mean, Terrible, with a capital T. Yeah, I said it. The sycophants on MXNA who think that by praising Adobe's new site design they'll curry some kind of favor can suck it. They're doing a disservice to everyone who visits that site by giving Adobe a pat on the back for this garbage design.
It's like your great aunt who is a terrible cook, but nobody has the heart to tell her. So, for years they tell her how good her food is and she is deluded into thinking her food is delicious, thus everyone is forced to eat her terrible food. Well, Adobe is not my great aunt and they should be told straight up since they are, for all intents and purposes, the sole provider of tools for design on the web, and should be the face for good design on the web. This is one ugly mug.
I've sent colleagues and coworkers to the site and every single one of them - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - says "Yuck!", "Ew", "WTF?" or "What were they thinking?" Nobody I know thinks their new site represents good design whatsoever.
One would think that with all the money and access Adobe has, and all the talented designers in the world using their products, they'd be able to find somebody to make a well-designed site that's nice to look at. Instead, they ended up with this eyesore of a site.
And who are these bloggers saying that they optimized the new site for widescreen monitors? How? Because they align the search box in the top right corner of the browser? Seriously? Even the home page is baffling. In a maximized browser on the 15" MacBook Pro you have to scroll down to see most of the useful content (I don't count their oversized self-advertisement on the top as content).
The only pages that have a modicum of decency are the support pages, and even then they're just passable. Thankfully, that's where most of my time is spent at Adobe.com these days.
We should expect more from a company like Adobe. Don't give them a free pass on this one. We'll be stuck looking at this ugly, poorly designed site, for a few years at least. Blech.
/rant
Some Quotes
gabe: "wtf is that about? I can't stand it"
ian: "it probably started with a great idea… but got ruined by committee"
laurie: "i don't like the new design. and it's all left justified. and what's with the massive flash on the home page?"
paul: "that's horrible"
mike: "OW OW OW MY EYES. this is pretty bad. "
curtis: "If the various sites that I depend on had that kind of interface, I'd find new sites to use."
laurel: "embarassing. i'm sure they will hear it from the industry"
rhett: "please use the word "pitiful" somewhere on your blog in reference to their new site design. it deserves pity. i've seen worse but this is fucking adobe for fuck's sake"
michael: "hey, why did adobe drop all their HTML into a blender? what’s going on there?"
Posted in Uncategorized
December 7th, 2007 at 11:07 am
/agree
December 7th, 2007 at 11:36 am
I really don't see what is so bad about it. I work for a major Web Media company as a developer and on any screen of respectable size and quality, the website looks and operates smoothly. It definitely does not deserve a rating of "terrible" like you have given it, in fact I am shocked you think it is so bad. You can say whatever you wish since it is your blog, but it would be nice if you were a bit more descriptive in your post as to why you think it is so bad, instead of mindless ranting.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I like the idea of a larger "banner" section with videos. But neither of the 2 videos that play on it are all that impressive. If you're going to block off that much space for video content, you should at least spend some serious money doing it.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Not to mention the front page Flash doesn't even work. You can't click on any of the links. I know that's a "fixable" thing (unlike the overall design), but I'm a Flash developer and I would NEVER let a bug like "NONE OF THE BUTTONS WORK" get posted to a live site.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:58 am
I was wondering how long it would take some malcontent to badmouth adobe lol Poor guys, they can never win
December 7th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Hi Steven, if you'd like to talk with the web team as well, then they've got that feedback widget at the bottom-right of the front page.
jd/adobe
December 7th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I can think of much better ways to utilize the same elements, lay them out, make them useful. The site has no consistency. That blender comment is spot on. It's a mess, an example of too many cooks, a site built by a committee who were at odds with themselves, and a lack of an overall vision and message. The pages compete with each other instead of meshing together to form a cohesive whole. It's as if they designed the site to please the people who designed the box art and not for the people who actually use the site.
Adobe.com is a big company with a lot of visibility and enough money that they shouldn't have to put up with shoddy work or be beholden to anyone about rushing a new site to launch when it was clearly not ready.
I've got a ton of great ideas on how to use some of the elements on their site. I've got ideas on how to build their site to work with and without Flash. This is how I make a living, so I can't very well give them away for free.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Absolutely Agree, Poor Design This Time.
December 8th, 2007 at 11:47 am
I both agree and disagree
I really like the visual design, but dislike that you have to scroll. I think there's too much "sales" and too little of what I need. All the stuff I find useful are hidden in sub-pages…
December 10th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Surprisingly - it runs faster than the previous rev. I've found for a few years that Adobe's site is one of the worst performing sites on the web - maybe inhereted from the previous MM site, but I'm always surprised that they don't emphasize performance. Flash detractors have always cited poor performance as a drawback - in this case I've agreed.
I like the large video content section in some ways, but find that the new layout provides a lot less useful data and makes it more difficult to find anything useful.
December 12th, 2007 at 9:32 am
I don't like the new design of the Adobe site either. This site however is totally awesome!
December 12th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Thanks for the compliment, John!
December 20th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I think the site is pretty great, handles the massive amounts of data the site contains and is generally way better than the last version. Although I'd really enjoy hearing a detailed criticism rather than this simplistic "yuck, it stinks!" review.
December 20th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Statements like "the site is pretty great" and "is generally way better" contain the same amount of detail that "yuck, it stinks!" does, which you said is simplistic and not something you enjoy. I'm just sayin.
December 21st, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Use the "Feedback" crosshairs widget on their site, and tell them how badly it sucks. No need to provide your help for free, but if they receive enough negative feedback, maybe they'll fix it and you won't have to deal with the eyesore.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Adobe has never had what one could call a beautiful web site design. The former Macromedia site was neat, clean, and slow - but really superior to anything Adobe had done in the past. That's not to say the site is not usable… it's just not pretty… or well laid out, or very symmetrical
Making decent graphical software has absolutely nothing to do with good design, in my opinion, so Adobe should not be held to such a high standard. If there was a relationship, you would also see it in the web page templates they ship. Again, it's just the way it is. If it affects sales or if they feel embarassed, I'm sure they'll hire a good desgin team to make things look better.
December 27th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I agree with most of you here, while the site has useful and functional and good in those important areas, to look at it is definitely inferior to the previous design.
For a company which arduously focuses on giving us software to create beautiful designs, it's not done itself justice with it's new website at all.
December 28th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I fear the worst has happened at Adobe. This new site design is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not the only user who has issues with the quality of CS3 (3 hour install time, registry hacks required, animation in the applications causing my system to run poorly, having to decifer microsoftesque little icons to find the collapsed panels I'm looking for, etc), so I am not surprised that the new website is horrible. Adobe has lost site of the most important part of design: function. Designing for the web is not the same as designing for the printed page. The web demands that layouts and content be visible even if the page isn't fully loaded. If you're going to forgo content for flashy animation, make sure the animation is worth seeing. The animation that ran yesterday must have been a megabyte without a preloader! Amateur hour. What happened to all of the standards loving Macromedia employees. Were they laid off?
Thanks for the forum to vent. I really wanted to see Adobe take on Microsoft after the merger, but instead, they just became Microsoft.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
AGREE!!