What is Adobe Max?

Adobe Max hosts creatives every year in downtown Los Angeles for sessions on the Adobe software creative suite. You have probably heard of Photoshop at least once in your life. Photoshop is one of the most popular image editing programs on the market currently. Photographers, designers, and business owners use it to make their product photography beautiful. However, that’s not all Adobe makes. They make software for illustration, animation, sound and video, and web design. UI/UX is another field that has emerged in recent years. This software helps professionals to design systems for users such as websites that are easy to navigate, or product images that need light retouching.

Adobe Max gives an opportunity to find out new trends in design, updates to the software in their creative suite, and learn new skills. The conference gained popularity because of how comprehensive the panels are in covering topics across the design field. Business owners attended and creatives alike. It’s a theme park for creatives. You could walk the floor and demo wacom tablets worth $5,000 or create projects and buy tech toys not available anywhere else. People would bring their laptops and camp out on the floor meeting other creatives for nerdy conversations. It truly was a yearly treat to meet other creative professionals from all around the world and especially to meet the creators of the software we use every day.

Why attend now?

Although this year Adobe Max was entirely online, I really felt I got a lot more out of it. Where panels would be hit or miss in past years, and the tech toys might amount to just a t-shirt, instead of the giveaway one year being a Windows Surface Pro tablet (I was there that year and yes we did get one), I felt this year the emphasis was on content. The panels all were jam packed with content geared on leveling up your skills.

Would I recommend it for a beginning designer?

It might feel a little over your head to attend this conference. I would recommend this conference for year two of your college program, or if you have been working with Adobe software for more than a year. It’s quite advanced despite their being tracks for all levels. A lot of the sessions can feel overwhelming if you don’t have at least a year of experience with the software. I had already been working in design for 4 years before I attended my first Adobe Max conference. However, I want to add that not just designers attend this conference. I had the pleasure of seeing a panel where Jessica Hische displayed her newly released book. If you know who she is, then you are probably a typographer or designer. That was the last year we were able to attend in person. This year it felt like the focus of most of the panels was on new tech, rather than inspiration such as Hische’s panel.

Takeaways from Adobe Max 2020

Adobe Max really felt as though the technology we are using is going to rapidly change in the upcoming years. The first year they revealed Adobe Sensei felt like the first time artificial intelligence had touched our design industry. Now it feels more and more progressively integrated. Although I love the advent of new tech, more intelligent design, I am wary about how this will change our industry. With the new ability for tracking progress on work done in InDesign, how will this affect our industry when designer’s are already pressed with tight production deadlines? Coming from someone who has worked in this industry for nearly 15 years, I’m afraid it will encourage micromanaging, tighter deadlines, drills, and fire storms on the timeline of already unreasonable schedules. How will artificial intelligence or new surveilling affect our industry? I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned.