Announcing the 2024 Adobe MAX Creativity Awards honorees
Every act of creativity is worth celebrating. That goes double for our 2024 Adobe MAX Creativity Awards honorees. From stunning digital designs to fearless applications of Adobe’s latest AI innovations, these six exceptional talents stood out from an impressive field of candidates for pushing the boundaries of creativity and setting new standards in their fields.
This marks the first year for the Adobe MAX Creativity Awards, which recognize excellence, innovation, and leadership across Adobe’s creative community, and we were awe-struck by the winning work submitted by our first-year honorees. Hailing from around the world, these individuals displayed levels of skill and dedication to their craft that is sure to inspire fellow creators everywhere. In addition to celebrating the most inspiring works of 2024 at MAX, we are also honoring an organization that is leveraging creativity and innovation to drive true positive social impact and change. Read on to discover who is receiving the first-ever Adobe Creative Impact Award.
And the 2024 Adobe MAX Creativity Awards honorees are:
Digital Design: Lia Ferreiro, Todas Musas
Our first award celebrates the most detailed and flawlessly executed digital design of the year. Lia Ferreiro’s work for Spanish art and design collective, Todas Musas, struck the judges both for its beauty and its clarity of vision, and they were not alone in their admiration. Todas Musas was also showcased at OFFF Barcelona 2024 and featured in both Gráffica and Vein Magazine.
Todas Musas’s mission is to address the gender gap in the creative industry by highlighting the work of Latin American women from diverse cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. The collective functions as a directory, allowing patrons to search for and discover artists based on their discipline and location.
Drawing on historic references like Spain’s Páginas Amarillas phone book, Ferreiro’s designs for Todas Musas combine the nostalgia of the past with the unity, legitimacy, and boldness of the collective’s broader mission. She also worked with intention, ensuring that her designs work seamlessly across web and print mediums to create a holistic experience for Todas Musas’s audience. To conceptualize and develop her designs for Todas Musas, Ferreiro combined the power of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.
“I’m passionate about using design as a tool to create a positive impact in society, make statements that can strengthen social movements, and celebrate my culture.”
-Lia Ferreiro
Experimental: Anton Burmistrov, Recursive Approach
The Experimental award goes to the most creative and unconventional use of Adobe’s solutions. This year’s honoree is graphic designer Anton Burmistrov, who used Adobe Firefly as a magic wand that allows designers to turn any shape into any object they can imagine. Dubbing his experiment Recursive Approach, Burmistrov elevated basic vector design into a proper typographic artform, giving designers more freedom to explore their creativity than traditional 3D software.
Burmistrov created the unique lettering for Recursive Approach, by feeding black-and-white structural references and style guides into Firefly. Instead of the traditional method of prompting the software to create images or sourcing reference material from the Web, he created images using simple prompts and edited them manually to create original reference pieces that he could then use alongside his other type designs.
Burmistrov’s fearless approach to generative AI introduced a game-changing method for creating typography that also ensures the authenticity and originality of designers’ work. Hundreds of artists have since started using his methods in their own typographic designs.
“I had tried structure and style reference tools as they emerged, but Firefly completely transformed how I approached design concepts. It became a powerful and instant idea visualizer, overcoming a long-standing hurdle I’d faced: the time and knowledge required to bring ideas to life.”
-Anton Burmistrov
Use of Color: Thomas Dubois, Kimono
The Use of Color award recognizes the best use of unique and original color palettes in a creative project. This year’s honoree, Thomas Dubois, played with colors, light, and shadows in Adobe Photoshop to create Kimono, a series of dreamlike scenes that combine detailed fantasy with Japanese-inspired digital paintings.
From pastel landscapes of cherry blossom trees to concept art highlighting the details of life as a geisha, Kimono guides viewers through a range of emotions and sensations. Where some images evoke tranquility and calm, others convey a sense of grandeur through bold and vibrant hues.
Dubois’s architectural background has given him an acute sense of spatial dynamics, composition, and storytelling. By applying a careful contrast between light and darkness in Kimono, he was able to bring a remarkable sense of depth and dimension to the project, making each piece in the series feel alive and immersive.
“Adobe tools have been integral to my creative process for many years. From the moment I transitioned to digital work, they felt like a natural progression, providing the versatility to explore a wide range of mediums and storytelling techniques. Their ability to support diverse forms of expression has made them indispensable to my creative journey.”
-Thomas Dubois
Thomas Dubois brings geisha characters to life with bold, vibrant tones. Source: Thomas Dubois.
Animation: Gabriele Calvi, Mom, How Fresh I Am
Few mediums are as captivating as animation. For Italian motion designer, Gabriele Calvi, it also evokes a spirit of playfulness. This year’s honoree of the Adobe MAX Creativity Award for Animation created a cheerful music video called Mom, How Fresh I Am to motivate young children and teens to brush their teeth. The pun-filled short film is catchy, fun, and, most importantly, effective, proving that great storytelling doesn’t need to be serious to make an impact.
Calvi’s starting point for Mom, How Fresh I Am was the catchy song music and lyrics. With total creative freedom, he then storyboarded the film, workshopped different illustration styles, and eventually created the final animation. Every element was designed in Adobe Illustrator and animated in After Effects, with the help of essential plugins like Rubberhose and Overlord.
Reflecting on his use of Adobe tools for Mom, How Fresh I Am and his other projects as a freelance designer, Calvi loves how the apps allow him to easily move between visual channels and mediums to meet different client needs while taking a meticulous approach to creativity and design.
“I am obsessed with details in both design and animation, ensuring each project is polished and precise. With Adobe, the possibility to move from one software to another seamlessly is like having a well-organized tool at my disposal to help me achieve my vision.”
-Gabriele Calvi
Mixed Media: Manal Elias, VidCon Anaheim 2024
The Adobe MAX Creativity Award for Mixed Media honors the exceptional blend of media into a compelling and cohesive piece. This year’s honoree is Los Angeles-based Manal Elias, who created and directed a complete 360-degree marketing campaign for VidCon 2024, one of the world’s largest celebrations of digital brands, content creators, influencers, and their fans.
This year’s conference also marked the 15-year anniversary of Minecraft, making it a must-attend event for many in the global gaming world. In honor of the anniversary, which informed VidCon’s theme, Elias centered her branding and experiential design around the immersive and magical world of video games and the supportive communities surrounding them.
Combining the power of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Frame.io, Elias developed more than 1,000 assets for this year’s VidCon conference in Anaheim, California, which drew 55,000 attendees. Spanning advertisements, merchandise, on-stage graphics, photography, posters, and more, the breadth and strength of Elias’s output is a testament to her status as a mixed media master.
“To develop a 360-degree campaign on this scale, my creative process involved jumping back and forth between Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and so on. This seamless transition is only possible with Adobe tools.”
-Manal Elias
Storytelling: Kevin Jin Kwan Kim, What Did They Say?
The final category of the 2024 Adobe MAX Creativity Awards celebrates engaging and impactful storytelling. This year’s honoree is Korean-Canadian director, Kevin Jin Kwan Kim, with his poignant film about an immigrant child who grows up having to translate for her mother. Created for NextShark in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, What Did They Say? went on to receive viral recognition and garner more than 30 million views online.
Kim’s work captures viewers’ emotions by finding the most powerful connections between shots. He has been lauded for his ability to tell intimate, relatable stories in a short span of time, as evidenced by the intense sense of connection he establishes in just one minute with What Did They Say?. Through his films, Kim hopes to raise the voices of people in the Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community and he cherishes collaboration with other passionate creators to drive that mission forward.
Kim’s main editing tool for What Did They Say? was Adobe Premiere Pro, used with Frame.io, to encourage seamless collaboration between himself and his team. Having grown up on Adobe products, Premiere Pro is his first choice for non-linear video editing (NLE). Thanks to the solution’s flexibility, he was able to use the pancake editing method to view multiple timelines alongside each other, choose his favorite selects across all the footage shot for What Did they Say?, and combine them in a separate timeline with ease.
“Adobe Creative Cloud is just the standard. It's quick, intuitive, and designed as a tool for creatives. I've been using Premiere Pro and Photoshop from my dad's computer since I was a child, and today it's essentially an extension of myself, a tool that allows me to visualize and execute my ideas.”
-Kevin Jin Kwan Kim
Adobe Creative Impact Award: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Nonprofit organizations work tirelessly to tackle some of the most complex and important issues affecting our society. As America’s largest and most influential child protection organization, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has shouldered this responsibility for 40 years, and Adobe is proud to name them as its first Adobe Creative Impact Award recipient.
The NCMEC receives more than 70,000 cases of child sexual exploitation each day and relies on the right tools and technologies to identify victims, uncover their possible locations, and provide law enforcement with the information they need to rescue as many children from harm as possible. Using Adobe Creative Cloud and Photoshop, NCMEC develops age-progressed photos that assist law enforcement in finding missing children, sometimes after years or even decades have passed. Since its inception, NCMEC has helped law enforcement to recover more than 426,000 missing children.
Today, the Center is also improving young people’s internet safety awareness and preventing online victimization through its NetSmartz digital program, which is also powered by Creative Cloud. In that spirit of safety and respect for privacy, NCMEC uses Adobe Acrobat Sign to obtain parents’ consent before posting any photos of their children online or on its social channels.
Congratulations once again to this year’s Adobe MAX Creativity Awards honorees. Click here to dive deeper into their winning work and learn more about the Adobe MAX Creativity Awards.