Adobe just revealed the "functional and joyful" future of its software design

Adobe has revealed the second generation of its Spectrum design language, a common UI design across the entire Creative Cloud suite. Due to launch in 2024, Spectrum 2 is the company's vision for the future of Adobe experience design – one that's "about feeling at home". 

Spectrum 2 is a comprehensive update encompassing every design element across the entire, um, spectrum of Adobe software, including iconography, typography, colour, brand, illustration, accessibility and more. Much like Google's Material You, Spectrum offers a series of small details that add up to a significantly tweaked entire user experience.

Spectrum was first unveiled in 2013, long before Creative Cloud became a multi-platform service across web, mobile, desktop, and mixed reality (and, of course, before the advent of Firefly AI). "In the intervening years, visual trends have come and gone, design systems have grown from a niche emergent practice to a bedrock of product design, and the level of quality that users expect from digital experiences is higher than ever," Spectrum's senior director Shawn Cheris shares in a blog post.

It turns out the new look is heavily inspired by Adobe Express. "One of the main opportunities that surfaced during our Spectrum 2 brainstorms was that Adobe experiences could be more expressive and approachable (the work we’d done for Express had already pointed us in that direction)," Cheris reveals. "At the same time, we were putting more focus on cross-product workflows, which meant that we would need a unified visual language across all our products. It became clear that we should combine the foundational Spectrum design language with Spectrum for Adobe Express—which is how the Express theme became our starting point for Spectrum 2."

Some of the main new areas focussed on with Spectrum 2 are dynamic contrast and brightness, more accessible colours and attention hierarchy. Adobe’s brand colours are now used system(s)-wide, while icons balance "the sharp rationality of Spectrum's original icons with the thicker and more bubbly Adobe Express style." In other words, Spectrum 2 is the love child of Adobe Express's fun and friendly design, and the slightly utilitarian world of the rest of Adobe's design right now. Adobe says Spectrum 2 will begin to appear in updates to some products later this year, with a larger rollout taking place in 2024.