My Adobe MAX Experience by Erica Strassburg
My 2020 Adobe MAX Conference Experience
This was my first year attending the Adobe MAX creative conference as they opened the opportunity to tune-in globally for FREE. Coming from an artistic background I was excited to find out what the conference was all about.
What is Adobe MAX?
“Adobe MAX is a conference hosted annually by Adobe for creatives around the world. There are sessions for basically every creative discipline you could imagine. This year, MAX was FREE.
This presented a fantastic opportunity for young creatives like myself to join in on the fun that design conferences offer.” - Celine Fucci My Experience at Adobe MAX 2020
When Adobe MAX posted about this conference I was interested but my first reaction was….”eh, I probably already know a lot of these tricks”, “I could find this on YouTube if I needed”, “I don’t have the time for this” or “you couldn’t pay me enough to go back and sit in on another “college-like” learning course”. But then I started to research a little bit more and found out that this was not just a typical learning course or standard “how to” conference. This was an immersive and engaging digital experience for designers to come together, celebrate how much they enjoy creating digital art and how they incorporate that in the professional world.
The sessions offered had many different attributes;
1. Refresher in all the latest Adobe Creative technologies
2. Highlighting new updates to all the programs such as Adobe Premier. This touched on video editing which has been a frequent request of dealers/retailers.
3. Explored the creative journeys of prominent artists who’ve provided advice on being an artist in any kind of business. Looking into the mindset of successful artists and how their application can be utilized.
4. Optimizing current Adobe tools to feed your creative needs.
All these areas piqued my interest. I registered and looked at all the different sessions I could possibly sit in on in three days…. THERE WERE SO MANY SESSIONS TO CHOOSE FROM! There were sessions to fit all creative backgrounds and experience levels.
There were also celebrity appearances from Conan O’Brien, Chelsea Handler, Stanley Tucci, DJ Marshmello, and one of my favorite speakers: David Choe.
There were classes streaming all over the world from Central America to Japan and the UK. I mainly chose to listen to the Keynote Speakers which were exclusive to livestreaming and were full of content that could only be seen on specific days.
The remainder of the sessions and workshops were recorded and remain accessible post-conference. I thought it would be most valuable to revisit the recorded sessions later and comb through the content over time.
As a Digital Consultant, I value opportunities to utilize my creative background making assets for my clients. We receive so many creative requests and it’s important to continue to expand on our artistic abilities to provide new ideas that will catch the eye of automotive shoppers. In hearing of the Adobe MAX Conference, I thought it might bring additional value to our clients and my team.
All in all, I recommend tuning in on these types of opportunities and learning more about the latest and greatest Adobe programs. They can optimize our value to our dealers/clients and assist in creative development. Continued education through conferences such as Adobe MAX can ultimately help in our roles through better creation of assets and new creative marketing strategies for them.
After three days of listening to all the different influential designers and their challenges as growing artists, I grew more and more motivated. Even though there were subjects covered that don’t directly pertain to my everyday work tasks, the conference offered great advice and knowledge that I can incorporate into my career path down the road and in my future at Shift Digital.
Lastly, the conference offered some exciting ideas on how I could spice up some of my deliverables. I would recommend checking out a couple of these sessions to anyone interested in creative work.
They can be found on www.adobe.com. For those working with dealers/retailers, I recommend the sessions about the main programs we use daily such as; Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Creative Cloud, Adobe Premier, and many others. We’ll never know how expanding our creative skillset could help bring more opportunity to our roles and to our clients.
“Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.”