After holding virtual-only editions for the past two years, Adobe MAX returned this year with a hybrid showcase of new and cutting-edge products, creative trends, and inspirational sessions.
This year’s event-themed Creativity for All showcased how Adobe and other tools empower creatives to make stellar content while improving remote collaboration, accessibility, and time management. What stood out the most is how brands are adding AI and automation to their workflows to produce new, global content and taking significant steps to recognize the importance of health and well-being for all creatives.
Influential voices from Adobe, Showtime, TikTok, FX, and comedian and entrepreneur Kevin Hart shared the stage and screen to share their thoughts on creativity’s current and future state. We’re still taking it all in, but here are our top takeaways from Adobe MAX 2022.
With the global marketing industry reaching $3.6 trillion, the demand for creative content is heating up. Creative teams face the added pressure to generate more content across multiple platforms and campaigns. Unfortunately, the added load of projects often means more administrative tasks for creatives.
Creatives spend about 50% of their productivity time on tedious administrative tasks.
Burnout directly affects creative professionals’ ability to be creative. Creative professionals and their extended teams need to identify tools that allow them to take back control of their time. With more time, teams can experiment and have fun which leads to more new and original content. In a session, How to Manage Burnout and Protect your Creative Well-being, Kitiya Palaskas, Adobe Express Ambassador, identified practical tips like implementing tools such as Adobe Express to remix and customize templates and schedule and automate marketing content. Additionally, Palaskas shared the importance of exploring self-care practices every day—whether it’s stepping away for lunch or taking one day off a week to explore creative development opportunities and activities outside of work.
One thing that’s for sure is that creatives want their time back to deliver their best work. Creative and marketing teams are doing this by adopting new practices and tools toward developing more agile workflows.
Using various automation and workflow tools, creative teams can make the most of their time and cross-collaborate on remote or hybrid teams. Teams are finding success in more agile creative workflows using tools like LucidLink to store assets and collaborate across remote teams; Adobe Express to create templates for content, graphics, and flyers; and Workfront to track and iterate on projects.
In the session Creativity Connected: The Importance of Agile Workflows, Vashi Nedomansky, ACE, Co-founder at VashiVisuals joined David Leopold Strategic Development Director, M&E at LucidLink, to discuss the importance of embracing new tools and technologies that reduce friction in collaboration when working across remote teams.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just about robots taking over the world. Design teams are bringing AI and automation into their workflow more now than ever. Leveraging tools like MidJourney, Adobe Sensei, and OpenAI’s Dall-E-2, designers and teams are amplifying their creative outputs to reimagine how mood boards, artistic images, and even hyper-realistic design experiences are generated using the latest tools. These generative AI design tools elevate designers from just creators to design curators—helping them to iterate on concepts faster and contextualize design ideas in ways they did not have the time or capacity for in the past.
In the session, Leveraging AI to Extend Your Creative Toolkit, MDavid Low, Head of Experience Design at atypical LLC, showcased the latest AI design tools and discussed the unique responsibility creatives now hold in shaping how AI is used ethically by brands and beyond. Creatives are setting the tone for how AI is used in design, and with that, it’s important to remember that good design values accessibility and demands creative and social intelligence.
It’s crucial that design teams have inspirational leaders to help operationalize, scale the practice, and build structures for success.
Research shows that design-led companies have 32% more revenue than other companies, but a recent poll by McKinsey concluded that only 10% of CEOs reported that a senior designer played a meaningful role in their company’s strategy.
Strong leadership impacts how design connects to the business and ensures design is integrated into the right conversations and decisions. It’s easier for design teams to align cross-functionally when they clearly understand how their projects align with the overall needs of the business. Another way to align internally is to ensure creative and marketing teams and leads are strategic partners who own the execution of the brand. This includes outside agencies to help ensure all expressions of the brand are an extension of the design and creative team.
In the session Unlocking the Value of Design: Advancing Your Design Practice, Andy Vitale Executive Vice President, Design at Rocket Companies shared how focusing on OKRs helps to move the needle in design. OKR stands for “objectives and key results”, and is a goal-setting framework used by teams, and organizations to define measurable goals and track outcomes. Instead of creating design OKRs in a silo, embed design OKRs into larger company objectives. This opens the door for greater collaboration across teams and helps design teams scale with a greater focus on impact and ROI.
The move to remote and hybrid work environments is changing how creative and marketing teams work together. Creatives are now working on larger-scale global projects faster—making it critical for workflows to work for everyone no matter where they’re based. Cloud-based workflow solutions make this possible by giving teams global access to the assets they need on demand.
Creative teams need tools that support an efficient workflow and give them the space to flex their skills into more experimental and ingenious areas of design. With creatives now working together remotely across time zones, it’s crucial that they can access projects and files as needed no matter where they are. Cloud technologies have become major allies to teams helping them collaborate with ease and amplify their production outputs. Want to improve your creative well-being and workflow? LucidLink can help, learn more in this quick 3-minute demo.
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