Original Photoshop icon

John Knoll in 2008:
I made that icon. Sorry if you don’t like it. It is 20 years old now, so you might want to bear in mind the era it came from.

It was intended as a 1 hour photo booth, similar to a Fotomat booth, which were a very common sight in the late 80′s when we were first developing Photoshop. It’s meant to be a person manning the booth and a cash register inside the booth.

At that time, application icons were 32×32 pixels, 1 bit per pixel. The “128″ is the resource ID number. That image is a screen snapshot from ResEdit, the common resourse editor at the time.

Whether you like it or not, it’s much more representative of a “photo shop” that the eyeball icon that Adobe finally chose.

There were other icons that went with that. The re was a document icon that looked like a roll of film, and a plugin icon that looked like a “rectabular extrusion bracket”