Quel charte pour l’outil?
Voici un long article sur la création de la charte graphique de la Adobe Creative Suite :

Goals & Requirements

Below you’ll find what Adobe wanted to accomplish from an experience standpoint:

• Expressive. The product splash screens for CS3 and CS4 were basically extensions of the product icons. This helped establish the powerful color system that we now rely on for our brand. Having done this for two releases, there was some leeway in CS5 to do something a little different, and we had an opportunity to push it even further for CS6. We wanted to get back to the more expressive nature of pre-CS Adobe products while keeping what we loved about the past few iterations.
• Interaction with the desktop. Our work lives in and interacts with the OS. We were interested in what ways we might exploit the parameters and limitations of those interactions. Back to squares. The folded-plane icons of CS5 were a reaction to the splash screens. While we liked the aesthetic, there are a ton of reasons to avoid non-square forms for brand assets. For instance, the CS5 icons tend to be awkward as avatars for social media and don’t translate to mobile environments.
• Creating a Creative Suite brand segment. After we launched CS3, the default move for Adobe applications was to simply throw them on a square and give them a two-letter designation. That worked great when we had 20-ish products, but we’ve now got well over 100 and have long abandoned this practice. We wanted to create something that would be unique to Creative Suite.
• A more cohesive connection to marketing imagery/packaging. More on this later, but in a nutshell, we wanted to partner as closely as possible with our marketing department and external agencies to try to make the two experiences relate to each other.

Shawn Cheris explains further:

Our work is functional and must be optimized for the contexts in which it will be consumed. There’s a lot of ins and outs, but the basic requirements are fairly straightforward:

• Legible. Application icons should be distinguishable from one another at small icon sizes, on file icons, and in the OS. Icons must be differentiable beyond color and should be legible for color blind persons via shape, letter-forms, tone, or other method.
• Differentiable. Application icons must be visually distinguishable from the previous two version’s icons since many customers run concurrent versions of a product on one machine.
• Flexible. There must be enough flexibility in the branding system to accommodate the variations across the product line and allow for appropriate icons for products, product line extensions, technologies, servers, and a large range of file types.
• Credible. The branding system must be credible to our creative audience. This doesn’t mean everyone has to like it, or that it is non-controversial. It means that it adheres to core design principles around typography, color, composition, etc. In other words, we should make something we’re proud of.
• Consistent. The equity of our brand is built through consistent execution. While allowing for the occasional technical limitation, the icons, splash screens, and other high-visibility branding areas should vary as little as possible from product to product or should vary in a highly prescribed way. Each product is part of a system, the sum of which defines our brand experience.

Via http://veerle.duoh.com/design/article/the_new_cs6_branding