Announcing the MAX 2025 Creativity Awards winners
The second annual Adobe MAX Creativity awards set out to honor the world’s most innovative and impactful creative work powered by Adobe tools. Join us in congratulating this year’s winners for excellence in their respective fields.
Design
Professional Design
Castil
Maria Vioque Niguyen, multidisciplinary designer and co-founder of HONDO, works by exploring the intersection of analog and digital design. Her work is driven by a love of poetic visual language and thoughtful storytelling. At HONDO Studio, her team reimagined the identity of Castil, an Italian brand with a rich heritage in metal craftsmanship and contemporary furniture design. The goal was to create a visual language that reflects the strength and versatility of Castil’s steel-bending process. Working in close collaboration with type designer Ignacio Casco, they developed the bespoke Castil Mono typeface and a new logo, both core elements that capture the brand’s precision and adaptability.
The resulting design system is clean and flexible, celebrating Castil’s customizable products while supporting expressive and functional applications across all touchpoints. This rebrand embodies HONDO’s commitment to collaborative and thoughtful design, giving Castil a versatile platform to share its distinctive approach to modern craftsmanship.
Professional Design
Forketta
Moh Febri Adiawarja is the creative director of WOBL Creative, a studio based in Malang and Bali, Indonesia. With over eight years of experience in the creative industry, Adiawarja specializes in illustration and graphic design, blending vibrant ideas with aesthetics that resonate with audiences. His work balances creativity and clarity, ensuring every design not only speaks but connects.
Adiawarja reimagined Forketta as a way to reintroduce pasta to a younger audience — not just as a comfort food, but as a playful, creative experience. With thousands of pasta recipes circulating online, the options are both endless, overwhelming, and forgotten. Forketta flips that habit by encouraging young people not to just save recipes for later, but to actually dive in and try them.
Working alongside Bimo Finca Azvy, his Creative/Art Director, Adiawarja brought Forketta to life with bold illustrations, colorful packaging, and a tone that speaks directly to Gen Z and young Millennials. The goal: be the pasta that sparks joy, experimentation, and everyday excitement. It’s not just about eating pasta but about making it an adventure in flavor and creativity.
Young Creator
“Cruda”
Estrella Gracia is a multidisciplinary designer based in Valencia, Spain. She recently graduated in Design and Creative Technologies from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and is now working as a digital designer at Gusta. Her work focuses on experimenting with different design formats and fields — including editorial, packaging, lettering, digital, web, motion, and 3D — to discover new, creative ways to approach both personal and professional projects. She is passionate about blending technology and human-centered design to create meaningful user experiences.
Gracia is also active in the Spanish design community and creates educational and lifestyle videos on her YouTube channel. Her aim is to continue growing in UX/UI design while also connecting with more creatives that value experimentation and thoughtful design.
“Cruda” (translated to “raw” in Spanish) is an independent editorial project born as a response to the constant media bombardment of retouched images, finished projects, and the “lack of erratic references in our collective imagination,” as Gracia describes it. The project is the magazine: all 71 pages, three covers for a possible yearly collection, art direction of the photography for the covers, and the design of the header. It was also printed as a real-life prototype, including special paper stock, transparencies, and inserts to add rhythm and true imperfection to the final result.
Image Making
Professional Image Making
“The Lost Keepers of Flannan Isles”
Born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Hugo Cuellar is a London-based production artist, designer, animator, and illustrator. Spanning multiple creative disciplines, his work combines an eye for design, a strong sense of narrative, and a collaborative approach, helping brands, studios, and agencies translate concepts into striking visual experiences.
Cuellar was tapped by Fable Whisky, an independent brand of Scottish whisky makers that uses a unique storytelling approach to immerse their consumers in a world of distant tales, mystery, and, of course, traditional well-crafted spirits. They asked Cuellar to bring their brand to life, both in animation and packaging illustration.
Cuellar created “The Lost Keepers of Flannan Isles,” a real-life tale concerning the dramatic disappearance of the lighthouse keepers in the Flannan Isles, firmly set in the lore of Scotland. The project consisted of an animated film describing the tale in a poetic and powerful fashion, as well as a series of illustrations that feature important moments in the story, each being displayed in the different types of whisky boxes in the series.
Personal Image Making
Keshiki: Echoes of Colorado
Thomas Dubois is a filmmaker and creative director with a foundation in architecture. Trained to think in space, sequence, and structure, he applies core principles from architecture to every frame he shoots — creating a visual language that is restrained yet evocative. His work spans films, visual creations, pitch materials, and visual development for narrative IP, all unified by a meticulous, design-driven process that conveys his unique sensibilities into mesmerizing narratives.
“Keshiki: Echoes of Colorado” is a series of digital artworks that views Colorado’s rugged topographies through the lens of Japanese landscape traditions. Dubois used restrained palettes and deliberate strokes to translate early morning fog, the golden silence that follows a thunderstorm, and that tension between vast scale and intimate detail. The aim is to let gesture and restraint do the talking, to blend traditional forms with modern tools and find a new visual emotion in a familiar terrain.
In Japanese, keshiki (景色) means “scenery,” but it also carries the mood, memory, and soul of a place. That’s the heart of this work: Dubois seeks to reimagine this place through the poetics of brushwork, textures, and light.
In a visual culture that rewards speed and certainty, this project invites the viewer to slow down and engage, to experience a place through its mood, colors, and the in-between.
Young Creator Image Making
“Melcos in Metropolis”
Clément Berneron is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Bordeaux, France. Originally trained at GOBELINS Paris, he founded his studio MelcGraphic, where he specializes in creating dense universes in which the viewer can get lost and enjoy searching for hidden details. His work draws as much from observing reality as from the desire to transform it into fiction. The goal is simple: to share a sense of wonder by inviting everyone to dream like a child.
“Melcos in Metropolis” is an illustrated fresco that reimagines New York City by creating a unique ecosystem inhabited by characters called Melcos. The digital artwork blends observation and fiction, inviting everyone to explore, play, and lose themselves in the details. More than just an image, it is an ecosystem where the eye wanders, guided by curiosity and wonder.
Motion
Professional Motion
McDonalds, “Make it Click!”
Mardo El-Noor is a New Zealand-based mixed-media director-designer, recognized for merging live action with animation and motion graphics. With a background in graphic design, he brings a design-led approach to every project, drawing on UI and poster aesthetics to shape style frames, visual research, and concept pitches. A self-described style chameleon, Mardo focuses on creative solutions over a fixed aesthetic, a philosophy that has established him as New Zealand’s go-to director for mixed-media work.
McDonalds tapped creative agency DDB for help bringing attention to seatbelt usage during New Zealand’s summer road trip season. DDB partnered with El-Noor to revisit the iconic “Make It Click” campaign, first launched in New Zealand in the 1980s to spur seatbelt use. They brought in Kiwi DJ Jess Rhodes to produce a modern remix of the classic Kiwi anthem, with a fresh DnB mix — now reminding a new generation of drivers to buckle up and switch on Do Not Disturb to stay focused behind the wheel.
Personal Motion
“Noodlz”
Abraham Egbobawaye is captivated by abstract, graphical, and playful approaches of visual communication in both mediums, where he can challenge himself to communicate complex topics in simpler, graphic, and meaningful ways. He always hopes to learn and collaborate with teams on projects that are meaningful, fun, and delightful.
“Noodlz” is a series of sketches, 3D renders, and animations with a focus on dynamic, abstract compositions and movement. His simple hope is that the works make someone, other than him, smile. Egbobawaye brought it to life through play and tons of iteration, finding that making this series of artwork was much better than daydreaming about it.
Young Creator Motion
“The Tale of Two Cruel Rulers”
Anastasia Rykova is a visual developer and 3D artist working in the animation industry. Coming from a Fine Arts background, she views animation as one of the most powerful tools for self-expression.
With a degree in Computer Animation from Ringling College of Art and Design and professional experience as a VisDev artist and 3D designer, she often acts as a bridge between the 2D and 3D departments. Her portfolio includes roles as an associate art director/VisDev artist at Gasket Studios, 3D artist and cinematics designer at Air A Med, a workshop with Disney Live Entertainment, and mentorships with Women in Animation and CTN.
“The Tale of Two Cruel Rulers” is a 3D animated short film that serves as an anti-war statement presented as a cautionary tale. The story follows two rulers who, after causing a deadly war, fight over their peasants’ bones to decide who will rule a lifeless kingdom. It's a personal reflection on grief, war, and the absurdity of power-seeking.
Photography
Professional Photography
“Music in Berlin”
Maria Louceiro is a freelance photographer and art director based in Berlin, Germany. She studied Mining and Geo-Environmental Engineering but found that she loved drawing and photographing the mines much more than actually working in them. Then she studied Communication Design and has been working with both analog and digital photography and bringing a dreamy approach to her images, collaborating with clients such as Adobe, Polaroid, Universal Music, among others.
“Music in Berlin” is a series of images of the Pitchfork Berlin Festival, meant to provide a record of the event that immerses people in the festival’s special ambiance. This series tries to achieve dynamic compositions and expressions of light to explore the connection between music, light, and color. Her hope is to capture the magic of the performances and the atmosphere of the different concerts, in a vibrant and emotional way.
Personal Photography
“An Act of Becoming”
Izaskun Valmaseda is a self-taught visual artist based in Madrid, Spain. Her work lies at the intersection of Fine Art and conceptual photography, combining meticulous aesthetics with strong emotional symbolism. This multidisciplinary background shaped her visual, technical, and narrative approach from the very beginning. Her work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands, and she has collaborated as a featured artist with international brands such as ViewSonic ColorPro. She is currently expanding her practice into video art and digital media, incorporating emerging tools while maintaining honesty and full creative control.
“An Act of Becoming” is a self-portrait that portrays a woman caught in a suspended moment of self-redefinition. While the pose echoes classical portraiture, the digitally constructed environment — created with generative tools — unfolds as an inner landscape rather than a physical space. She inhabits a threshold: between costume and skin, past and becoming, tradition and self-authorship. Her gaze resists spectacle, charged with both vulnerability and strength.
Young Creator Photography
The First Supper 1995/ The First Supper 2024
Beatriz Simas, is Toronto, Canada-based artist and current graduate student in the Master of Art History program the University of Toronto. Simas explores notions of identity, cultural connections, and belonging through the medium of photography as well as the contextualization of art history. By performing self-portraiture, Simas touches on notions of individuality and different personalities through the careful curation of clothing, wigs, makeup, and props. Using herself as a living canvas, she embodies given characters — either larger than life archetypes or small, intimate and personal realities — in order to explore cultural contexts and dismantle traditional ways of viewing. A driving question in her practice is: What does it mean to be a first-generation Canadian with a strong cultural background, within a visual realm? Through a theatrical/character-based photographic practice, she thoroughly analyzes and creates fully realized characters, undergoing a physical transformation, caught on camera.
“The First Supper 2024” is Simas’ recreation of “The First Supper 1995,” a family photograph taken by her mother, nearly thirty years prior. Stricken by the original photograph's quasi-religious composition, the artist places herself in the shoes of her family, and subsumes herself in costume, including wigs, clothes, jewelry, and makeup in order to enter the internal psyche of those she portrays. This piece serves as an introspective look at the immigrant experience, reflecting on cultural dilution over time, and differences between being a first-generation Canadian versus recent Portuguese-Brazilian Immigrants.
Video
Professional Video
“Field Trip”
Saul Knight is a London-based cinematographer, camera operator and editor. He was born and raised in the countryside of Nottingham, England where he created short films with his school friends before moving to Bristol to study filmmaking and specialize in Cinematography. After moving to London, he worked as creative video lead for a leading fashion brand, and he is now a full-time freelancer working on social ads, fashion campaigns, documentaries, short films, and music videos. Knight has led large, multi-cam shoots and designed complex studio lighting set-ups — but he also enjoys solo shooting on location if the project requires.
“Field Trip” is a short, branded documentary film that follows six runners competing in “The Speed Project,” an ultra-relay race through Chile’s Atacama Desert — the driest, non-polar desert on Earth. Just grit, teamwork, and 500 kilometers of unforgiving terrain. From being chased by wild dogs in the opening kilometer to climbing from 250m to 3,700m elevation over 88km, this race tested everything for both runners and Knight: physical endurance, mental resilience, and the strength of the team.
Personal Video
“Spin Cycle”
Howard “Howey” William Mitsakos, is a filmmaker and creative director based in upstate New York. With over twenty years of experience in commercial cinematography and storytelling, he leads Novel Studios, producing award-winning commercials, films, music videos, and branded content for regional and national clients. His personal work explores surreal, psychological, and emotional themes of the human condition.
“Spin Cycle” is a short film that explores the emotional limbo people experience when they’re stuck between the lives they lead and the lives they quietly long for. The laundromat serves as a metaphor for that suspended state — a liminal space of waiting, repetition, and quiet reflection. The goal was to build a surreal-yet-grounded atmosphere that captured this “in-between” feeling, blending realism with psychological metaphor.
Young Creator Video
Alone in Greenland
Unai Canela is a filmmaker, environmentalist, and anthropology student at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain. He has contributed to documentaries, films, and various media productions as a director, narrator, cinematographer, and editor. After spending a year in Greenland, Canela is currently working on a TV series about Iberian wildlife in Spain.
“Alone in Greenland” is a documentary film born directly from Canela’s childhood. As a teen, he accompanied his dad on assignment to Greenland to photograph the melting glaciers. The trip caught Canela’s imagination. Six years later, he took a detour from his studies to embark on a formidable solo trek across Greenland’s Arctic tundra. “Alone in Greenland” documents his journey: tracking muskoxen, camping in front of glaciers, walking across frozen lakes, huddling on the shores of a frozen ocean, searching for poloar bears, and sleeping under the Aurora Borealis. In the process, Canela became aware of the fragility of this ecosystem — learning about the melting ice cap, which has a crucial effect on our planet’s changing climate.
Read more on this year’s winners here.