Adobe's new CS3 Icons...Farewell Feathers and Butterflies

Despite all the cool features we're discovering in the Photoshop CS3 public beta, one of the most talked about items seems to be the replacement of the "feather" icon with a simple 2-letter "Ps" on a blue block. Because the public beta also gives us a glimpse of the "Br" icon that comes with Bridge CS3, we can extrapolate that there is a trend afoot. In fact, Adobe Sr. Product Manager John Nack has been hosting a passionate conversation about the new icons on his blog, and even has a preview of some of the icons planned for other CS3 apps.

For those who are comparing loss of their feather, shell, butterfly, or starfish (there was a starfish somewhere, right?) to the end of the world as we know it, John's got a point when he says, "...isn't it nice that in this world, at the end of 2006, it's computer iconography that constitutes our nightmares?" With the critical mass of applications in the new suite, the demise of the arbitrarily assigned nature-themed icons seems inevitable. But I can't help but wonder what that means for the name of InDesign guru Sandee Cohen's Survivor-styled InDesign trivia game, "Escape from Butterfly Island." In a few generations, the name of the game itself may be a bonus question only veterans can answer.