Today, at work after I was done cleaning up the mess I made trying to eat the Photoshop birthday cake with my hands instead of using a fork like civilized people do, I was reminiscing my earliest memories with Photoshop. My first Photoshop was version 3.0.  Not CS3 but version 3.  It was my natural progression after trying out many other similar tools like Aldus Photo Styler and Altamira Composer - both came as special trial versions on a disk that came with some magazine I bought in Italy.  But once I found Photoshop, I never went back.  

 

So I was an Adobe tools user many years before becoming an Adobe employee.  But been at Adobe for quite some time now, I'm old enough to remember when Photoshop turned 20, five years ago.  I was part of the team that made a special reunion video with the first 4 people who's names appeared on the Photoshop 1.0 splash screen (by now it's a much bigger team that feels more like rolling credits to a movie) as well as a demo of version 1.  I went back and poked around some of my old backup drives to see bits of that project. I was very surprised to find something that I completely forgot about.  

 

I found this title animation that never made it to that video (because it didn't fit the tone and direction the video ended up being).  Interestingly the animation starts at a critical point in Photoshop's evolving visual identity.  It's right at the time when it finally became that iconic blue icon.  Sure, it took many other forms incorporating wonderful artwork by various users later on but those undeniable letters Ps on blue was ever present from then on.  So here's a quick turning back of the clock as to what Photoshop was before it became the blue Ps we all know today.