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Adobe.com redesigned

A nice, flat and toned down adobe.com is what greets visitors today. Once you visit the product pages, each product use the new icon colors and product backgrounds. Very fresh design that breaks with some of the "house rules".

The new site removes all bevels and fake 3D and goes for a nice mix of clean, solid color mixed with product imagery. The page title, breadcrumbs and navigation works really well. It's always there no matter where you navigate and makes it easy to see what part of the huge site you are on.

The new design feels wider than the old, but all pages except for the cover page fits within 800 pixels width. More than 75% of users now have 1024x768 screens or larger, so this is an interesting choice.

Despite the freshness and good looks, the design breaks with some common rules. One of these are to present important information upfront so there is no need to scroll the page. In an effort to push the products even harder, the core product navigation has disappeared.

For Flex, ColdFusion and some other products the old menu is still there, but all CS3 products have lost their product menu. If you want support for Flash you'll have to scroll the page four times (on a 1024x768 screen) until you see the word Support. There is however no direct link to the Flash Support pages anywhere in sight. To find these links you'll have to click something in the Product overview tab to take you to the product sub-pages. Here the product menu still exists. There is also a Support menu at the top of the page and you can easily find Flash Support from there, so this is really no "biggie".

The new site does a lot more "Hard Sell" on the main product pages and requires more scrolling. The site is now more menu driven, pages look like they've been more thought out (especially the Solutions section) and the general feel is actually more "print"-design than web design. We think that especially the page title / breadcrumbs will be copied a lot in the years to come. All in all, a great update to a site that many Flash / Flex users visit often.

Ohh... one more thing - we love that the Flash Exchange finally is HTML. Now we can open up two windows and compare components or even open up many possible components while browsing a list. Now if they could only do the same to the Adobe Store...

Click here to visit the redesigned site

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (December 07th 2007)