MAX 2022: My five key takeaways

A couple of weeks ago, our annual creativity conference, MAX, was brought to life in LA and around the world.

It was a momentous week, one that left me energised, invigorated and (when the adrenaline subsided on the return flight), yes, a little exhausted.

Above all, I left with an overwhelming sense of inspiration for the journey Adobe teams and the creative community are taking together, best summed up by my boss Ann Lewnes on the Day 2 keynote:

Below are my five key learnings from the event. Thanks for making the time to read and do reach out on LinkedIn in response – I’ve love to hear what you took away from MAX 2022.

Collaboration + community = creative possibility

Due to the global pandemic, this was our first MAX since 2019 to have an in-person element and, despite everything, I was still unprepared for the sheer thrill of seeing everybody together again.

The energy of so many people interrogating the future of creativity, with passion, intelligence and ambition, was wonderful to experience. It was clear this collaboration and sense of community remains key to defining what is possible tomorrow.

This was echoed by our President and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, who outlined how “we’re building the future of collaborative creativity on an even larger scale” because creativity is now a team sport. This means innovation and connection across the globe, and this year marked a ‘best of both worlds’ landmark – our first in-person and virtual MAX; a worldwide celebration of creativity fuelled by 200+ sessions and hundreds of inspiring speakers available to creatives everywhere.

AI is enhancing the future of creativity

The MAX Sneaks are a perennial favourite of mine, and this year’s session spotlighted the role of AI in unlocking creativity across almost every form of content.

With Project Clever Composites (pictured below), we saw how AI makes it easy to add a subject into any background, automatically cutting out the object, adjusting its colour and size, and even generating shadows by analysing the background’s lighting.

Project Magnetic Type, meanwhile, got a huge response. Adobe’s AI technology can now let anyone attach and instantly fuse any shape — even hand-drawn calligraphy — to a piece of live digital text, without distorting the original text’s aesthetics or its text-editability.

My final innovation mention goes to Project Beyond the Seen, which pushes the limits of immersive virtual reality by using Adobe’s AI to easily generate full 360° panoramas from a single image.

So, the power of the Sneaks was at an all-time high! It was brilliantly brought to life by our very own Bria Alexander and actor, comedian, entrepreneur, and co-host Kevin Hart, who tried to hilariously derail everything we rehearsed.

We’ve already put together a quick recap on our Sneaks blog and you can watch the entire thing here. But be warned, it’s an attention grabber. Put some time aside before you get sucked in.

It’s both the journey and the destination that count

The Day 2 Inspiration Keynote saw truly game-changing artists take to the stage to reveal what keeps them motivated and inspired. If I had to recommend one part, Kadir Nelson’s 20 minute lookback on his own career - starting around the 6 minute mark - was particularly striking.

It’s rare that you get to see somebody’s creative growth so clearly. From learning to draw as a kid to creating conceptual artwork that inspired the visuals for Steven Spielberg’s Amistad; hearing why he drew horses for over 1,000 days; how he painted the cover artwork for Michael Jackson’s posthumous album ‘Michael’ (listed as the largest poster in the world) and created the iconic album cover for ‘Nothing Was the Same’, by Drake – the award-winning author and artist had the entire theatre entranced.

It’s a fascinating look into his methods, how he thinks as an artist, where he takes his inspiration from and how it’ll shape his work to come. Find an excuse to escape for 20 minutes and give this a watch.

“Go a little bit out of your depth.”

I was honoured to introduce and co-host this year’s Unleashing Creativity with EMEA’s Leading Experts, and what better way to open this session than by quoting the master of reinvention and creativity himself, David Bowie:

This is what many of you do every single day, and the words rang truer than ever as we celebrated those across the creative industry constantly challenging convention.

I learned so much hearing from leading figures such as Harris Reed, Little Shao, the legendary Vivienne Westwood and so many more, who have channeled their own creativity to shape their lives and work. Check it out and I hope you’ll come away as inspired as I was.

Our Creative Cloud updates get more and more like magic

Where to begin.

Doubling down on my first point regarding collaboration, we released entirely new ways of working together to empower creation, not least the updates to Photoshop and Illustrator, where ‘Invite to Edit’ enables the co-editing of live files with co-creators, while ‘Share for Review’ lets users share specific versions of design work with clients and stakeholders.

We’re also harnessing AI to speed up traditionally time-consuming processes in the pursuit of empowering creators to work smarter, not harder.

Our Substance 3D Collection, meanwhile, introduced the new 3D Capture tool in Substance 3D Sampler, which lets users easily convert a series of real-world pictures into a photorealistic 3D model, completely changing how we jump from the physical to digital worlds. Substance 3D Modeler takes things in the other direction, allowing the building of 3D designs as if working with virtual clay to literally sculpt your imagination.

And last, but by no means least, I was particularly excited to see Adobe Express for Nonprofits, which provides the premium version of Adobe Express for free to nonprofits worldwide to help changemakers quickly and easily make standout content.

Seeing the reaction to the news announcements onsite, feeling the buzz around these genuine innovations – I will forever be impressed by our teams who work on this stuff, and the creative community that embraces them.

This is by no means everything we covered at MAX but condensing two days’ worth of creative inspiration into one blog post would be impossible. For so much more, our MAX hub remains the place. All we ask is that you take a look, continue pushing boundaries and keep creating the works that you want to see and experience.