Adobe designed its new color-coded office with a secret creative weapon
As the company behind the imagery and design software Photoshop, Adobe has a special sensitivity to color. Humans do, too, with color being able to affect mood, cognition, and attention. So, when Adobe began planning out a new office building at its corporate headquarters San Jose, color was used both as a form of branding and as a tool for helping people do their work.
Inside, the office uses three distinct color schemes to subtly explain how each part of the building is meant to be used. There’s a blue zone for focused work, a green node for collaboration, and an orange node for community building and social interaction. Intended to be subtle cues to employees as they move from space to space throughout their work day, the color schemes help define the building, and the way people work in it.
“We were very focused on reducing cognitive load for our employees,” says Eric Kline, Adobe’s director of global workplace experience. In collaboration with the color consultancy LOVE GOOD COLOR, Adobe designed the building to reflect the neuroscience behind color’s affects on the mind, and to elicit a general set of emotive responses based on the space.
The oranges and burgundies used in the building’s double-height break room are intended to encourage more active social behavior, seeding the space for serendipitous and informal cross-departmental interactions. The greens and yellows of the meeting rooms and team hubs are designed to spur curiosity. And the blues and teals of the semi-private booths and library-style work tables encourage focus.
Within each of those colored nodes, employees can find spaces for a variety of tasks, from focused solo work to group meetings to department wide gatherings. “People are really looking for choice,” says Kline.
The layout of the floors was built around clusters of workstations and meeting rooms called neighborhoods, all located near larger flexible gathering areas called team hubs. “You might work in a neighborhood, but a team might come together in a hub and do some context setting or even celebrate a birthday in an area that’s a little more casual, but near their work area,” says Noelle Borda, Adobe’s senior manager of workplace design and innovation. Gradients of colors are used to show where these more interactive spaces exist on a floor, and where there are workstations meant for use by individuals and small teams.
The new building, called the Founders Tower, is an 18-story expansion of Adobe’s campus, which has been based in downtown San Jose since 1994. A pedestrian bridge connects the three existing buildings to the new tower, which includes an all-electric kitchen, a publicly accessible cafe, an art gallery, and a corporate museum. Spaces on three floors are dedicated to employee amenities, and the building includes special rooms like meditation rooms, music studios, and a craft room. “There’s a lot of Easter eggs hidden throughout,” Borda says.
But even these rooms are arranged in the building with purpose, according to Kline. “While we all know that we need to focus and get work done, a great way to stay motivated, engaged, healthy, empowered, and feeling included, is to be able to have a lot of different choice around different ways that you can engage in things that help you feel well, especially from a neuroscience point of view.”
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