Better Collaboration While Working from Home: Adobe Creative Cloud Unveils New Tools and Features
Over the past few months, the world around us has changed a lot, and creative businesses have had to adapt. Design teams, who may have been used to bouncing ideas off each other in person, are now mostly working from home. Finding effective ways to collaborate and co-create across distances is even more important for business outcomes.
Just as creative businesses and organisations are working hard to find ways to overcome the challenge of operating amid COVID-19, Adobe Creative Cloud is working to design and implement new features that make collaboration between designers and stakeholders easier.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce a host of new enhancements across Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services. Regardless of how you work as a team, and how you work with developers and marketers, we know these features will help empower you and your team to do your best work.
Adobe Illustrator: Work faster and smarter with Cloud documents
Adobe Illustrator joins Photoshop and XD in introducing Cloud documents. Cloud documents are the best way to work faster, smarter, with anyone. They save automatically and fast. Easily accessible right from the Home screen, now you can track, label, and revert to previous versions directly within Illustrator.
This is only the beginning of what you can do with Cloud documents in Illustrator. Soon you’ll be able to share documents with others for editing or reviewing directly within the app. And with Illustrator on the iPad coming soon, your cloud documents will automatically be available on your tablet, wherever you are.
Learn about everything that’s new with Illustrator here.
Adobe InDesign: Get to final faster with collaborative reviews
When it comes to gathering rounds of feedback and approvals on layouts and designs, dealing with multiple tools and fragmented workflows can tank productivity and creativity. That’s why InDesign is introducing its new Share for Review feature, designed to create a faster, more seamless collaborative review process.
With Share for Review, you can share your designs with reviewers through a web link, so they can review and comment online, without needing to download any files or software. Their comments will flow back into InDesign, so you can incorporate any necessary changes without leaving the app.
Adobe XD: Real-time collaboration, wherever you need
UI/UX design is a team sport; it involves close collaboration between designers, developers, product managers, copywriters, and other stakeholders to take an idea through the process and into production.
XD offers real-time collaboration with Coediting, which is available in beta. You and your teammates can work together in the same cloud document, creating a single source of truth for every project and helping you keep everyone on the same page. You’ll see when others are working in the document with you and exactly where in the document everyone else is designing. Any changes you make are visible to others in real time, helping you and your team move faster and stay aligned. You can use Coediting in both the Windows and macOS X applications and work online or offline, depending on your needs.
As part of the June release, XD is also excited to introduce Design Tokens, a new way for designers and developers to describe colours and text styles when translating designs into code. Now, you can add custom names to assets in XD, like naming a colour “Primary Blue” or a character style “H1 Heading.” When you apply a custom name to an asset, those tokens will be published in your Design Specs, so developers can use those same custom names in their code. Design Tokens help your team move faster and make sure everyone has a common frame of reference as you go from design to code. Design Tokens are available on all XD plans, including the free XD Starter plan.
You can learn more about these features along with other new features in Adobe XD in the XD June release blog post.
Adobe Premiere Pro: Access audio assets in CC Libraries
Creative Cloud Libraries are the best way to save, store, and maintain consistency in your files over the cloud. Now, this powerful tool is coming to Adobe Premiere Pro’s audio editing workflow, which should make it easy for teams with multiple editors to share elements.
Premiere Pro uses will now be able to use, save, organise, and share audio assets right from the Creative Cloud Libraries panel. This makes it easy to keep track of audio assets across projects, allowing you to reuse key audio elements with a simple drag and drop, no matter what machine you’re working on.
Adobe Spark: Creative Cloud Libraries access right in Spark Post
Adobe Spark has long been an invaluable tool for many creators looking to easily create and share impactful social graphics, videos, and animations that stand out. Now, you can access your Creative Cloud Libraries right from Spark Post. This saves you time when creating — access your favourite assets right from your Libraries inside the Spark Post web editor, and use them to create eye-catching content. It also turns Spark into an even more effective team tool — create consistent content across your team by pulling all the right, up-to-date assets you need from any CC Libraries that are shared from you.
Collaborate seamlessly with Adobe Fonts auto-activation
Accelerate your workflow when collaborating with other Creative Cloud users by working with Adobe Fonts. Both Adobe Photoshop and InDesign have added Adobe Fonts auto-activation to give you a more seamless experience, like the one you’ll find in Photoshop for iPad and Adobe XD. When you receive a project, you’ll always have the Adobe Fonts you need as these apps automatically activate them for you, all without leaving your document or seeing a disruptive missing fonts dialogue.
Creative Cloud updates Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations for even smoother communication
Adobe Creative Cloud integrates with many leading collaboration tools like Teams and Slack to help you be even more productive and connected to your team. These integrations let you quickly share Creative Cloud assets, preview links to designs, easily add collaborators, and help keep your teams updated on important activities happening on your creative projects.
We’ve made big improvements in how Creative Cloud works with these essential tools by adding broad support for Creative Cloud apps like Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat, and commonly requested features to help you and your team stay up to date. Now, you can get notifications on file activity like new comments, updates to links to creative files, and more, all right in your team channels.
If your organization uses Microsoft Teams check out Creative Cloud for Microsoft Teams, or if you’re on Slack, check out Creative Cloud for Slack. And check out our recent post on Creative Cloud integrations to help you stay connected and productive.
Adobe Creative Cloud is now more collaborative than ever
We hope these new features and functionality make it easier than ever for you and your team members to collaborate, communicate, and create together across your workflows, even when you simply can’t be together in the person.
Office life will change a lot now and into the future, and in this new normal, the value and importance of the work you’re doing will only become more significant. We’re invested in making it easy to keep doing design work together, no matter the challenge, so you can keep doing what you do best: creating.