Exploring New Features at Adobe MAX
Starstruck by Adobe MAX 2023 and Excited for the 2024 Conference
Last fall, our design team had the incredible opportunity to attend the Adobe MAX conference in sunny Los Angeles. Aside from the selfie-worthy expo hall and talented list of speakers, Adobe MAX also showcased an impressive number of innovative systems and programs.
With a new conference to look forward to in November, the design team shared their highlights, their favorite sessions, and the new tech that’s on the horizon:
1. Game-Changers for the Creative Industry
Some of the most exciting parts of Adobe MAX 2023 were the generative AI technologies shared during the keynote sessions. These updates offer the potential to revolutionize the way designers work, unleashing imaginations and simplifying complex tasks. A few of those impressive updates included:
Adobe Express
An all-in-one web app for print creation and social content, Adobe Express is a time-saving tool with simple animation capabilities. Another bonus is that it works seamlessly with other Adobe programs.
After the conference, our team started using Adobe Express as a stepping stone for creating some of our design work. Files can be locked and shared easily with other teammates to review in and out of the agency. Our team also shares design templates across departments, so project managers and strategists can quickly make text or image adjustments on projects with tight deadlines.
Adobe Firefly
Adobe’s AI program possesses the ability to generate images in a specific style, which can be fine-tuned utilizing examples or selected from existing references. Firefly can be used to add, remove, blend, or expand content in images. It is designed to be safe for commercial use and requires clever prompt writing to guide the bots to produce the best images, vectors, or patterns.
Our design team is still determining how they want to integrate Adobe Firefly into their work. It has limitations with generating faces and hands, perfecting realistic lighting, and relying solely on user input. This has huge potential to be used for expanding images to fit horizontal or vertical placements.
2. Sessions that Stood Out
The conference gave our design team a platform to connect with other creative professionals and exchange ideas and experiences. They attended various sessions, collected information, and shared their findings with each other. Here were their favorite sessions:
Laryssa’s Pick
“Powerful Personal Branding: Unmask Your True Identity” by Chris Do, Founder and CEO of The Futur
Chris Do delved into the captivating world of comics, pop culture, psychology, and storytelling to uncover powerful personal branding strategies. He spoke about assembling a team of collaborators who will help you achieve your mission.
Do explained the importance of creating a striking visual identity and how to remain consistent and authentic across all channels. He encouraged designers to identify three key points to focus on when developing their personal brand:
- Identify your allies, sidekicks, archnemesis, rogues gallery of villains
- Craft a compelling origin story, and discover your hidden superpower
- Design an eye-catching visual identity and find your two-word brand
Melissa’s Pick
“For Type Lovers: A Guide to Animating Typography” by Zipeng Zhu, Founder of Dazzle Studio
“How do you go about making every day a razzle-dazzle musical?”
During their inspiring session, Zipeng Zhu, a queer immigrant artist, shared their story of an evolution of self, and how that manifested in their work. When they first immigrated to NYC from China, they aimed to blend in instead of standing out, but quickly realized their strength lay in the colorful exuberance in life and their creative work.
“We were all that kid that stayed up late making a poster, or making a zine — when did that become not fun?”
Showing off a mesmerizing collection of animation work, Zhu reminded us why we get up in the morning to create—whether it’s for a client or simply for the fun of making something for ourselves.
3. A Peek into the Future
Adobe MAX 2023 has given us a tantalizing peek into the future of creative technology, and we’re excited to see how these innovations will shape the world of design and creativity in the years to come:
- Project Stardust revolutionizes image editing through object-aware AI. It automates complex image-editing tasks, making it accessible to users of all skill levels. The user will be able to edit objects instead of layers, developing natural, photo-realistic results.
- Project Fast Fill brings Firefly’s generative AI to video to ease the addition, removal, or expansion of content in images with text prompts. It also offers an initial look at what human-prompted generative AI could enable inside Adobe video editing tools including Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Project Dub Dub Dub uses generative AI to auto-dub content in more than 70 languages and over 140 dialects, making content accessible to a broader audience. It can translate and match the speaker’s voice, tone, cadence, and acoustics of the original video. This instantaneous update saves a labor- and cost-intensive process and can be done in mere minutes.
Our design team absorbed as much information as they could at Adobe MAX 2023 and are very excited to see what Adobe MAX 2024 brings.
Education is at the heart of everything we do. If you are looking for a partner who is constantly exploring and learning new technology, we are ready to share our knowledge with you and solve your digital marketing problems. Let’s connect!