Adobe Max - Live from LA

The opening session, introduced by Chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen, got us excited about the new features in the many Adobe programs. Across programs, the "Share for Review" feature stood out. It allows users to create a shareable link to a project preview, which enables others involved in the project to feed in targeted comments.

Besides that, Illustrator's new "Intertwine" feature, which allows paths and shapes to be intertwined based on context, was particularly memorable. For instance, a rope path can be threaded into a converted font without having to cut shapes (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The new intertwine feature of Illustrator

Furthermore, 3D capabilities have been integrated into many programs to lay a foundation for a future world of immersion in virtual or augmented realities.

With all the developments toward a more complex world, it was a particular pleasure to accompany Frederica Fragapane, a self-taught information designer, in her creative process. She creates aesthetically pleasing abstractions from complex data that tell stories and convey emotion.

Her process orders itself according to three steps:

1. Select topics and sources
2. Sight, organize and analyze data
3. Define a visual model and design data visualization

In the process, she demonstrates a great attention to detail without losing sight of the big picture.

An equally inspiring designer was Kadir Nelson, an illustrator whose illustrations could rightly be called works of art. He enriched us with with the story of his becomings as an artist and illustrator and gave many insights into his works. His particular fascination is with stories of underrepresented heroes primarily from African American culture but also beyond. Each illustration lives up to its basic role as a conveyer of a message. However, the messages Kadir Nelson manages to convey often include apt commentary on controversial social issues.

With so much inspiration to illustrate, Natasha Polozenko's contribution was perfectly cued. She is a self-taught illustrator whose contribution mainly explained how to develop one's own illustration style. For this, asthetics, personal taste and a lot of experimentation play together to create a personal style guide for one's own style. Natasha Polozenko emphasized that one's own style is only a "style" if it can be used repeatedly for different illustrations. For this, the relevant characteristics of the style would need to be recorded in documentation to ensure recognizability in the future. While this documentation would of course remain adaptable, the style could evolve over time, especially within its boundaries. Natasha Polozenko was able to illustrate this very well with her own style, sparking an appetite for our own research and experimentation.

All in all, Adobe MAX 2022 was a successful hybrid event that managed to transport inspiration and fascination for creative work across the many divisive kilometers.