This year for the first time ever I was able to attend the Adobe Max Conference. For those of you who don’t know that is, Adobe MAX is a yearly conference held by the creative minds behind the Adobe products that we have come to know and love. They usually have around 300+ sessions and hundreds of speakers. This year was fully online and 100% free. You can even still enjoy the sessions on-demand here. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the different kinds of sessions. Some were product-based and some of them were industry-focused. It was a very well-balanced set of skill learning overall. Topics that I enjoyed most included:
- Creativity and Design in Business
- UX and UI Design
- Social Media
- Productivity and automation
One course, in particular, I felt related directly to both of these classes was the course “Creating Attention – Grabbing Photos for Social Media” speaker Bryan O’Neil Hughes taught us how to quickly capture, edit, and share dramatic, impactful photos; social graphics; and imaginative scenes from your phone. Bryan showed us how to transform ordinary photos in Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Spark Post, Photoshop Express, and Photoshop Camera. Whether taking selfies or artistic photos, you’ll leave the course with ideas on how you can make them stand out and when to use what app when. I took away from the session how to:
- Shoot and edit photos with Lightroom for mobile
- Apply stunning lenses and camera effects using the Photoshop Camera
- Transform my photos with different effects in Photoshop Express
- Add text, graphics, and animations to my photos for social posting with Adobe Spark.
I thought it was amazing learning about these techniques that not only captured my attention as a designer, but as a marketer, social media specialist, and also thinking strategically about how mobile can be utilized in these fields.
Another Course I took was called “Making Innovation Accessible and Designing Inclusive Experiences” Cat Noone, product designer and CEO of Stark, and Mrudula Peddinti, branding director at Limbitless Solutions, to learn how each company is working to make the world’s most innovative products accessible to all, from designing for color blindness to creating an inclusive experience for children with limb differences who are receiving prosthetics. One big take away from that session was actually a quote by Cat Noon “Accessibility is a byproduct of inclusive design” “it is not a feature to be added or a pitch to stakeholders” It’s something that we should keep in mind as marketers as well as designers. We need to think about how our audience is viewing and interacting with our content. Daniel Rowels said it in his book Mobile Marketing, “mobile is not a standalone topic. It is a search, social media, content, and everything else. What it comes down to are the user journey and understanding context.” This is exactly what Mrudula Peddinti and Cat Noone were discussing in their session. I recommend everyone give it a listen here.
References:
https://www.adobe.com/max.html
Noone, Cat, and Mrudula Peddinti. “Making Innovation Accessible and Designing Inclusive Experiences.” Adobe MAX. Adobe MAX, 2020.
Rowles, Daniel. Mobile Marketing. Kogan Page, 2017.
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