ADOBE MAX 2019
OVERVIEW
This year’s annual Adobe Max - The Creativity Conference was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The event ran by Adobe Systems, showcases and celebrates the latest and greatest Adobe products that help users “create in ways that seemed impossible.” The event spanned over 2 days, and event-goers were treated to creative talks from speakers like Shantell Martin, Paula Scher, and the great Takashi Murakami to name a few. Attendees were also treated to entertainment from legendary bands like the Foo Fighters.
Every year Adobe Max seems to step up their product releases but also their activations, speakers, and entertainers to help celebrate this creative community. Their vision on creativity is about making digital connections, and as such, Adobe seeks to “Change the world through digital experiences.”
NOTABLE ADOBE PRODUCTS
This year, Adobe Max celebrated the 20th anniversary of one of the staple adobe products, Adobe InDesign. This program is still a powerhouse in the creative industry and offers a flexible architecture to handle layout, typography and large format publishing.
The keynote showcased the newest updates to Adobe’s Creative Cloud and introduced several new Adobe products, each allowing its users to work and share their work more effectively.
Some of those products include Adobe Spark, a program that allows users to create, edit and share their social media posts, Adobe Photoshop Express for mobile and a full version of Photoshop for iPads. Another feature for iPad users is the ability to start a project on the tablet and to seamlessly continue on the desktop.
One of the more notable improvements to the Creative Cloud has been the evolution of Adobe Sensei, a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning technology that is slowly being embedded into the Adobe products. Adobe Sensei provides a digital experience solution to enhance creative literacy and improve Adobe products. In other words, it analyses your projects for the “subject” and suggests tools and actions help users speed up the creative process.
Adobe Libraries is another feature that was added to the array of services this year. With it, users can create design systems, and categorize elements like typography, imagery, colours, etc. in specific libraries. This allows them to share their work with other collaborators or to use these elements in multiple types of projects.
Throughout the years, Behance, a networking platform that allows designers to not only showcase their portfolios but also offers live streaming tutorials created by experts, has seen an important growth with numbers topping at 18 million users. The platform continues to foster the creative community with events and opportunities for users to share their work.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN - ADOBE XD
Adobe’s products are now being designed with the end-users in mind, and in this case, not only how designers work with each other but also how they work with their development and business partners as well in today’s landscape.
Spectrum, Adobe’s design systems, includes design and prototype tools as well as a tool to share projects in Adobe XD. The use of design systems helps accelerate the creation and design processes through the creation and use of components (Atomic Design) and instances to elements to create interfaces.
In addition to the new design system, Adobe XD also optimizes current workflows in experiential design by allowing users to stage interactivity components rather than duplicating artboards. States can now be combined with Adobe XD’s Auto-Animate feature to add motion to the design experience.
Collaboration features have now been added to Adobe XD that allows users to co-edit projects. This adds transparency to the design process and gives it the richness and robustness of a true desktop application.
AR DESIGN - ADOBE AERO
This year, Adobe has also ventured into the world of Augmented Reality with its new Adobe Aero, an app that allows users to create immersive and interactive AR/VR experiences. This new application is a first of its kind as it bridges the digital and physical worlds by allowing users to share augmented experiences that are interactive and immersive without any coding skills.
The application scans the world around you and lets you bring in elements, like PSDs or images to add them to the scene. With layered files, you can separate and create depth by moving layers in the z-space. Within the app, users can also add interactivity into scenes. Elements can have triggered behaviours which users can design, and now motion can be added into these AR scenes.
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Adobe continues to be a leader in the world of design Their range of products and programs allows designers to not only hone their skills but execute creativity at a faster pace and higher level than ever before.
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Jason Jay
Founder & Creative Director | CONTENDER Studio
www.contender.studio
info@contender.studio
905.699.5260