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 (P) 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.