Adobe Premiere Identity
I originated the horse motif for Adobe Premiere back in 1994, on the 4.0 release: concept, illustration, photo compositing, and packaging design. The idea ran deeper than a pretty picture: it was a direct connection to Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878 photographic studies of a galloping horse, later known as "The Horse in Motion," settled a long-running debate by proving that a horse at full gallop lifts all four legs off the ground at once, a moment of true weightlessness the naked eye couldn't catch, but Muybridge's camera could. Strung together in sequence, those frames are considered one of the first moving pictures ever made, the literal ancestor of cinema.
That weightlessness, and that leap from still frame to motion, was the whole point: it spoke to the ease of editing with Premiere, and tied the software back to the very origins of the moving image.
The collage itself was a purpose-built design reference too, drawing on Italian Futurism, specifically Carlo Carrà's 1914 painting "Interventionist Demonstration," with its radiating, fragmented bursts of type and image. My approach was to represent an exploding television in that same dynamic, Cubist/Futurist way: newsprint, laser prints, photocopies, magazine clippings, tempera paint, and hand-drawn lettering, torn and layered by hand onto illustration board, 11.75" x 17", radiating outward as if the television itself had just gone off. I then composited a photograph of a white horse into that background in Photoshop, along with the Muybridge reference and film sprockets, all of it built to sell that same idea of movement, editing, and making movies with a tool that fit on a few floppy disks.
Nine years later, in 2003, I was called back to it. I'd left Adobe and founded design:unknown in 1996, but I'd kept freelancing for Adobe in the meantime, and Premiere was still running on the horse I'd originated for 4.0, except the identity had drifted off course, weighed down with interface references, poor compositing, and lackluster photography. I wanted to elevate the horse into a cinematic hero worthy of a tool aiming for a real comeback in film and video, so I brought in RJ Muna, who I'd worked with before on the Adobe Gallery Effects image, to photograph a graceful and powerful horse at Limantour Beach in Northern California. It was a breezy, perfect day, and the horse put on a show, galloping up and down the beach, reveling in the Pacific, while RJ captured her.
After picking the best shots, I illustrated the symbols, reintroduced Muybridge and the film sprockets referencing the original 4.0 image, and spent hours fine-tuning the composition. The blue version became Premiere 7, the first release of Premiere Pro. Building on the same base file, I created a sunrise version for Premiere Standard, an interpretation I still find even more evocative and impactful. Two versions of the same idea, nine years apart: one built by hand from cut paper, the other from a real horse on a real beach, both chasing the same sense of motion.
Credits
John Caponi / Concept, illustration, and compositing / Adobe Premiere 4.0 (1994) and Adobe Premiere 7 (2003)
Gail Blumberg / Adobe ECD / Adobe Premiere 4.0 (1994)
Eddie Yuen / Adobe ECD / Adobe Premiere 7 (2003)
RJ Muna / RJ Muna Pictures / Photography, Adobe Premiere 7 (2003)
