Adobe Stock is enabling creativity for all with new free assets and Artist Development Fund

Image credit: Adobe Stock/Good Studio.

Each year, our annual creative conference, Adobe MAX, reminds us of the power and importance of creativity for all. This year, amid the extraordinary challenges we’ve faced including but not limited to the coronavirus pandemic, it is even more resonant.

In good times and in bad, creativity is resilient. It has the power to drive positive change. The potential for creativity exists within everyone. To unlock that potential, the right tools and opportunities must be made accessible and inclusive.

We are excited to announce two new initiatives to help inspire and empower diverse voices as we democratize creativity.

Democratizing creativity with the new Adobe Stock free collection

Launching today, the new Adobe Stock free collection includes over 70,000 high-quality, photos, vectors, illustrations, templates, 3D assets, and videos, hand-curated from talented Adobe Stock artists. Whether you’re looking for a vibrant photo, an engaging video, or a sleek icon, the Adobe Stock free collection showcases a wide breadth of popular topics that are aesthetically fresh and will inspire you to create your best work yet. This new collection is a way to empower our community by making the means to create accessible to all, while supporting our artists.

Stock content has long been a powerful tool for creatives. Whether using it to jump-start projects, quickly visualize and pitch ideas and concepts, or combine licensed and original content into something new, creatives rely on stock to help them do more, faster. Today, it’s even more essential that content creators have access to sophisticated imagery, while considerations like shrinking budgets and the need for social distancing have made it extremely challenging to create original work.

The free assets are sourced from the world class Adobe Stock collection and come with the same commercial licenses as our paid assets. Customers licensing free content from Adobe Stock can use this content in their personal, business, or commercial projects with the peace of mind that they are sourcing content ethically and respecting the artist community.

With the free collection, you can take advantage of all the time-saving search filters you’re used to on Adobe Stock, such as filtering by Copy Space, Depth of Field, and Color. You can also look for content similar to an asset you like by uploading an image to our Visual Search feature.

We understand how much effort goes into creative work, from idea to finished product, and Adobe Stock makes sure artists are paid for creating this valuable content. In supporting artists for providing free content, we see this as investment back into the artist community to continue evolving the creative landscape, while ethically creating greater opportunities for stock customers.

Check out the free collection on Adobe Stock.

Image credit: Adobe Stock/Rawpixel.com.

Elevating diverse creators with the Adobe Stock Advocates program and Artist Development Fund

Now more than ever, visuals matter. We hear from customers that it’s increasingly difficult to find visuals that reflect our reality — from COVID-19-aware social distancing to imagery that accurately represents a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds, with different skin tones and body types, different ages and races.

The Advocates program is a new initiative from Adobe Stock focused on championing self-identifying artists and content from underrepresented communities. To reflect Adobe’s commitment to inclusion, Adobe Stock is taking meaningful action: We’re investing $500,000 in a new Artist Development Fund. Forty selected artists will use these funds to embark on ambitious new projects in 2021, offsetting costs that too often become barriers to developing new productions, like paying models, renting spaces, and covering equipment costs.

Image credits, clockwise from top left: Adobe Stock/Rawpixel.com; Adobe Stock/Hero Images; Adobe Stock/Rawpixel.com; Adobe Stock/Artinspiring.

The Artist Development Fund offers empowerment and meaningful financial support for talented artists across a diverse intersectional spectrum, with a goal of promoting imagery that has been historically underrepresented in commercial advertising.

Starting this winter, Adobe Stock will announce eight overarching themes along intersectional narratives to inspire and source proposals from underrepresented communities. Foremost among our selection criteria for Fund recipients will be the ability of these artists to authentically portray visual cultures associated with their own diverse regional, ethnic, and lifestyle communities. This group of artists is unique, and we will collaborate with them as specialists deeply embedded within the communities they depict.

The Artist Development Fund will allow us to offer creative and financial opportunities for artists and fill an acute market gap by spotlighting the value of their communities. Content created through the Fund, sponsored by Adobe Stock, will be included in the free collection exclusively for one year. By offering this content as widely as possible while supporting the artists making it, we aim to make high-quality, diverse imagery more accessible to every creator, and encourage its growing production.

Learn more about the Adobe Stock Advocates program and Artist Development Fund, now open for applications.