Marcin Wichary’s new blog Unsung is great, and you should read it. Today, it brought me some fresh existential user-interface horror, in the form of Adobe’s new “Modern User Interface,” which Adobe describes this way:
Modern User Interface modifies the appearance of some control bars and dialogs to be more consistent with other Creative Cloud applications through adoption of Spectrum, Adobe’s multi-platform design system. We plan to modernize the entire user interface over future updates.
Wichary’s reaction to this was very much the same as mine:
On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.
Like Wichary, Cabel Sasser, and many other people, I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.
