Well, I had no idea that this was coming, but Adobe AIR has received a finalized logo. I’d actually kind of thought that the square with “AIR” in it was final, after all it did match the form of the current CS3 apps. It looks like Adobe may be trying to give it’s individual applications or application families a stronger visual identity, which can only be a good thing.

Thinking back Macromedia’s applications all had an individual identity, admittedly all on a single theme, but they were strong enough to last through several versions. The current element/square icons for the applications are nice, but I don’t think they have the same sort of flexibility. Then there’s the recently released logo for the Photoshop family of products. The Photoshop logo is a little puzzling sine it was released not long after the CS3 release, but doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any of the current releases. We’ll just have to see what Adobe has in mind for it I suppose.

The AIR logo release makes a lot more sense to me. AIR isn’t a final released product yet, and isn’t really a stand-alone program, so strong branding is going to be important. As far as logos go I really like this one, it’s simple, recognizable in a number of formats, and has a meaning behind it (bringing together HTML, Flash, and PDF). I’m excited to see how Adobe promotes AIR as it is finalized, I foresee some exciting times ahead.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen it, this is the new logo: