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Adobe Website

Example of a page in the Premiere section

Assignment: Design a rich and complex website to showcase all of Adobe’s software products and services. In addition, the website should showcase some of Adobe’s best customers and new ideas. Launched 1996.

Approach: In late 1995, I was hired as a designer contractor into Adobe’s Creative Services group. This group was responsible for all the marketing, collateral and packaging for all the products in the company. I was brought in to round out the small 4 person webteam—I had designed a website before and knew HTML.

We worked with Studio Archetype to create to overall architecture and framework for the site. They also provided some intitial design direction, but after several rounds we brought the work in-house.

The site was divided into several top level sections: What’s New, Products, Solutions, Studio, Support & Services and About Adobe. This navigation was present in a persistent nav bar across all pages.

We decided what items went into each area and then proceeded to create pages for all the Adobe products—basically mimicing the product brochures in terms of content. WE also created showcase pages of Adobe customers to show what they have done with the software, we created highlight pages of new products and services, we created a full support area as well as a fully fleshed out area about the company including an investor section, a jobs area, history of the company etc.

Over 10,000 pages were created (when you factor in a product page for each font) by hand. We used BBEdit and Debabelizer to produce our pages. This was in the days before WYSIWYG editors.

Each designer in the group was responsible for working with the Art Director of the product area—the Photoshop Art Director was responsible for making sure the Photoshop pages in the site “felt” like all the other Photoshop materials including the packaging—but we had ultimate call for the cohesion of the website.

Outcome: During the course of a year and a half, I created hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages, hundreds of header images and graphics for the site. Our pages were rich, image heavy and full of content.

The site was very well recieved and was one of the premiere destinations on the web for its time. We made changes continuously as user feedback came in and as we reviewed the user logs.