I completely forgot about this post on Adobe’s Brand Experience Blog until Stephen Hackett linked to it this morning.

It takes well over a year to design, execute, deliver, and ensure the proper implementation of the roughly 5,000 or so assets it takes to get a CS release out the door (we’re already thinking about CS7). Along the away, there are innumerable institutional, technological, and political hurdles to overcome. It can be daunting, but we do everything we can to get it made with as few design compromises as possible.

Of all the screenshots, design concepts, and other graphics in this article it is this image of their splash screen less-versus-more continuum that grabs my attention. I consider the splash screen design that was used in CS3 and CS4 to be the best one — it was simple, basic, and minimalistic. And yet the Adobe designers consider that design to be far too simple, and they label the “sweet spot” to be mostly “more” with only a little bit of “less”.

Designing the CS6 Desktop Brand