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On John Nack’s blog, he unveils the new logo and tagline for Adobe’s Pho­toshop fam­ily of products. The aim is to tie together what’s become a pretty wide-ranging suite of products.

He then (bravely) asks his read­ers “So, whaddya think?”

The answer appears to be: not a hell of a lot.

Now, pro­fes­sional cre­at­ives are always going to be a tough crowd but it’s safe to say that the pos­it­ive com­ments are out­weighed by the neg­at­ive ones by about 50 : 1.

For my money, I find it con­fus­ing. It’s dif­fi­cult not to simply see a speech bubble and won­der: what’s that got to do with a photo app? Oth­ers com­ment­ing have already high­lighted how it looks like some other logos – and let’s face it, these days any logo based on a let­ter ℗ or resem­bling a com­mon sym­bol (the speech bubble) is going to have plenty of com­pany. The aqua treat­ment is likely to date rap­idly (it already feels old) and the tagline is a tad unin­spired. But then, it’s easy to cri­ti­cise other’s work.

Over­all, though, I won­der why Adobe felt it was neces­sary. Yes the Pho­toshop fam­ily is grow­ing but the name alone holds it all together – at the high end this is still the gold stand­ard for image edit­ing soft­ware and the app most people (at all levels) aspire to use.

To me, it seems a redund­ant exercise.

One of the things keep­ing me busy at the moment (notice the appalling lack of posts) is cre­at­ing a writ­ing guide for one of our cli­ents. The idea is to pro­duce a guide that is one part tone of voice guid­ance, one part style guide and one part stuff-they-didn’t-teach-you-at-school-but-will-really-help.

So it’s within this con­text that this art­icle in the Observer caught my eye. Essen­tially, it reports on a drive to appoint gram­mar police to assess whether the BBC is using stand­ard Eng­lish cor­rectly. Under the pro­posed scheme 100 unpaid ‘mon­it­ors’ would note gram­mat­ical errors and report back on them to a cent­ral adviser.

The idea makes me cringe.

It stems from the notion that gram­mar is fixed, that it rep­res­ents an immov­able set of rules that must not be broken. Ever.

Gram­mar is, of course, noth­ing of the sort. At best it is a set of guidelines, a snap­shot of the state of the lan­guage at any given time. Cer­tainly, if you take a wander through most mod­ern guides to gram­mar (eg the excel­lent Cam­bridge Gram­mar of Eng­lish) you’ll see a pic­ture of an evolving lan­guage where there are far more rules of thumb than absolutes.

The other thing that gets me about these kinds of schemes is that they tend to for­get that lan­guage is about com­mu­nic­a­tion. They get so hung up on tick­ing gram­mat­ical boxes that they fail to answer the most import­ant ques­tion: did it get the point across in the clearest, most com­pel­ling way? I’ve seen many gram­mat­ic­ally per­fect sen­tences span­ning 50 words or more that com­pletely fail to com­mu­nic­ate any sort of idea what­so­ever. Worse than this, they provide the reader with an easy excuse to stop read­ing and never come back. And that is simply a waste of words.