The software company behind Photoshop and Acrobat is named after a creek.
Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, two researchers who left Xerox PARC. Xerox management had declined to back their plan to commercialize the InterPress graphics language, so they started their own firm to sell what became PostScript. Wikipedia says the company began in Warnock's garage.
The name came from Adobe Creek, in Los Altos, California. Wikipedia says the creek ran behind Warnock's house. Wikipedia's article on Warnock says it ran behind the homes of both founders. Either way, the company took the name of a nearby landmark. None of the sources we read says which founder proposed it.
A German tech site, ChannelPartner, looked at the question and weighed three theories. It rejected one, that the name stands for "ado" and "be," as nonsense. It also treated the idea that adobe bricks suggest software built in modular layers as only indirectly related. Its answer was the creek.
The creek itself was named for the clay. Adobe is a Spanish word for a brick made of mud and straw and dried in the sun. It reached American English in 1739, according to Etymonline.
Where Spanish got the word is not settled. The Dutch Arabist Reinhart Dozy proposed that it came from an oral form of Arabic al-tob, "the brick," which he traced back to Coptic tube, "brick." Other writers connect it to the Spanish verb adobar, "to daub or plaster," which also gave English daub.
So the name of one of the world's largest software firms began as a term for building material. It passed through a stream behind a house in the Bay Area, and then became a company name. Nothing about the name has to do with design or software. The sources agree on that.