Use of Adobe product logos in personal website

[arunmenon1975]

Can anybody please let me know the guidelines for using Adobe product logos in personal websites. My plan is to use the distinctive product logo in a skills section/page that i have on my website.

For example, i list a few products like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver etc in individual card blocks with the logo and text(in case the images doesn't load for some reason). These Adobe logos would be part of an extended list including logos of other techs (like say HTML5 or Javascript etc etc). A user taps on some of these skills to make a selection and i list out projects completed using these selected skills. Most of the other logos are open source technologies and thus do not normally have binding clauses around logo usage like corporate driven products and services like Adobe's offerings(and other corporate organisations as well).

While i can have it just as text, a logo allows for quicker recognition and basically adds a splash of color and design to an otherwise drab page.

I do have a disclaimer on the page, and its relatively in a prominent position as well:

Disclaimer: All logos are respective trademarks of the associated owner organization or overseeing entity or person(s)

The official document at

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/legal/documents/Adobe_Trademark_Guidelines_11012014.pdf

has this information(on page 8):

You may not use any Adobe logo, such as the Adobe corporate logo or the triple-looped Adobe PDF or Acrobat logo, an Adobe product name in stylized form (i.e. logotype) or a company tagline, unless you have a specific license or other written permission from Adobe to use it — unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

My interpretation(duh) is that i just cannot use these logos with getting prior written permission. So basically all those logos that i encounter on various websites have been added after express written permission had been provided or, perhaps, there is some leeway in usage cases like mine.

I thought id ask here before evaluating whether to request permission via any available official channels. Since it can be a hassle (its a large company and i suspect they get tons of emails many of which with much more important content than what my communication would have, and  i expect the official response to be something on the lines of entering into a partnership program or something like that) i just may decide not to have it at all.

[P.M.B · Accepted solution]

Not speaking in any official capacity at all & possibly even with incorrect understanding:

I believe earning one of many possible official certifications from Adobe is one way to gain the right to use their logo (or a specialized version thereof) on your web page.  And even then you cannot just grab an image off the web, you have to get it directly from Adobe.

Think of it this way.  In order to use their logo you would first have to obtain an image of it, which there is no legal way to do outside of getting it directly from Adobe.   Any image you grab off the internet or anyplace other than directly from Adobe would be an illegally obtained image.

I would take a guess that the only exception would be the normal US copyright/trademark exceptions of using certain images for educational or journalistic purposes but even that is "iffy" and it's likely any organization who would qualify for those exceptions probably have an entire legal department to advise and defend them.

Having said all that I would not believe anything you hear from anybody unless that anybody is a representative of Adobe who is authorized to say boo.

[arunmenon1975]

Thanks for the response. Its as good an answer as i might get from official channels so i am marking it as answered.

My exact thoughts (though i didn't think about the possibility of an Adobe certification perhaps allowing for some easing in usage rights though, like you said, even thats a remote possibility if at all possible) and I just tried my luck in the off-chance that perhaps there was something that i missed. Having worked with corporate guidelines for a few clients -implementing solutions that had to pass through some rather sizeable guidelines and scrutinised to the pixel-  i definitely get it.

My best bet would be the non-logo approach since requesting permission and the ensuing mail-chain would essentially be a waste of the Adobe representative's time for something as minor as a personal website.

[Nancy OShea]

What difference does it make which tools you use?   I can honestly say no client has ever asked me which products I use to create print, images, animations, videos, or web development projects.   The fact is I use many tools -- some from Adobe and some from competitors.  

[arunmenon1975]

Sometimes there are vendor lock-ins in projects and in such cases it does matter. Adobe has a lot of buy-in in organizations especially in the creatives. By quite a margin.

Also in job hunting phases, considering that now almost all early processes are digital(sending a digital version of the CV to an email id or uploading to a DB or server versus shooting off a postal letter) I'm told that due to the sheer volume of CVs received, it is not humanly possible to read through all of them to find a fit for an opening. Software tools are used to sift through the CVs against some keywords. Invariably, in most digital media creation related oenings, Adobe and it's various tools will feature prominently as the early keywords to filter the CVs.

On a personal note, I like open source software. Besides the actual usefulness of these tools, the very concept of collabarative building of alternative tools is very radical and you have to admit that it bought a lot more people into using software in various domains. I also use quite a lot of other non Adobe tools as well, especially in the UX deliverables area(well, perhaps it could be because there was a void as Adobe almost missed the bus till the standalone XD came out) and more recently in writing code. But Adobe software generally has that edge both from a quality/finish perspective as well as the workflow focus. You just cannot not be productive.

Now, about the pricing...well, good things come at a price I guess.

[Test Screen Name]

You're probably right about software tools pre-filtering CVs. Such tools REALLY won't be impressed by icons. You need to use words.

[Test Screen Name]

Hmm, on reflection, the staff in HR also won't be impressed by logos. They will have no clue what they mean and will resent the time they have to spend ignoring them. So... they also need you to clearly use words, under a heading indicating the skill set you have.

[arunmenon1975]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Test+Screen+Name  wrote

Hmm, on reflection, the staff in HR also won't be impressed by logos. They will have no clue what they mean and will resent the time they have to spend ignoring them. So... they also need you to clearly use words, under a heading indicating the skill set you have.

Thanks for the comments and tips.

Ive already started the process of removing the logos. At first i thought i can remove just the "corporate" ones and retain the open source and others but it just didn't look too right. So as a democratic decision ive removed the logos for all. The website is - or will be - more than just the CV/skills etc and so the target audience is wider, or at least i hope it is. But currently (and into the near foreseeable future) it remains highly CV-centric. Im also contemplating a slight re-design of the skills section since i currently have access to the source data as well and can modify as needed. The heading>content flow is definitely less of a hassle so with some additions to the source data it should be possible to get some hierarchy going versus my current "flattened" structure.

[arunmenon1975]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Test+Screen+Name  wrote

... Such tools REALLY won't be impressed by icons. You need to use words.

Correct, and agreed.

[Test Screen Name]

You're probably already on this, but consider a careful (maybe explicit) division between "CV" and "portfolio". For some jobs you need both, but they do different jobs.

[arunmenon1975]

Actually i do have a Portfolio section that is distinct even at the DB level. My original thought was to link projects(a section in my CV) to the portfolio data( that would exist within the same table) since i assumed they would be connected directly.  Luckily i finally decided to have them separated, mostly so as to showcase anything that need not necessarily have to be tied with any of my published skills. It did go with my original intention of having a CV-centric site but with ample space for non job related showcasing of artefacts if required. The decision was some cause for concern early on as i wondered about the additional code that would be required to get things tied up proper.

An example for artefacts published to the portfolio but not tied to a published skill could perhaps be a hand-drawn sketch (which in actuality is a stretch considering that my best sketches haven't improved from the first-grade tree sketching attempts, but who knows maybe it can suddenly improve out of the blue) or maybe a link to a short story or something like that.

At a later stage, while developing the UI, it turned out that it was a good decision after all. I just had to link to the relevant portfolio data from within my more tightly controlled CV sections while i was free to add more to it independently without disturbing the flow.

Going by your earlier suggestion, I just managed to make the early changes to the skills section so that now there is a bracketing to the skills - a skill type.  Suddenly i notice opportunities for a more intuitive UI in this section and don't miss the logos as much.