{"id":2621,"date":"2025-05-08T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/?p=2621"},"modified":"2025-08-01T15:15:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T15:15:41","slug":"adobes-identity-crisis-pro-tools-in-a-creator-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/08\/adobes-identity-crisis-pro-tools-in-a-creator-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Adobe\u2019s Identity Crisis: Pro Tools in a Creator Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Adobe MAX<\/a> experience in London started off, well, rocky. I attended as a writer for PRINT, but I\u2019m also a professional designer, and it\u2019s this latter identity I couldn\u2019t ignore during the two-hour keynote. It felt like a caffeinated sales pitch: a lot of hype, a little love. \u201cAwesome\u201d was the word of the hour. Everything was innovative<\/em> and empowering<\/em>. But for a longtime creative like me, it felt more like d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. I sat through the demos \u2014 Scene-to-Image, Text-to-Video, Firefly Video model \u2014 and felt a growing disconnect. Adobe once represented the serious, sometimes messy, world of professional design. Now it felt like the company was chasing a generation of drag-and-drop creators raised on templates, not technique.<\/p>\n

As I watched Firefly Boards remix images with third-party integrations and AI tools churn out video captions and multilingual voiceovers, I found myself wondering: Is this innovation, or just iteration?<\/p>\n

The updates across Creative Cloud were extensive. Photoshop got another boost with improved generative fill and expand, and Illustrator added quick-click swatches and mockup tools (although I\u2019m certain I\u2019ve already seen the demos). Premiere Pro now includes transcript-based caption generation and multilingual voiceovers via Firefly Video. Project Neo teased a 3D type tool. Adobe Express lets you add motion and audio with drag-and-drop ease. Fresco continues inching closer to being a Procreate clone. Lightroom now lets you post to Instagram directly from mobile. It\u2019s all \u2026 fine. But are these updates really moving us forward?<\/p>\n

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Adobe describes all this as \u201cnext-gen creative access,\u201d web and mobile-first tools designed for a world where creativity happens on the go, on any surface. It\u2019s convenience, not craft: when every app becomes a remix generator, every designer becomes a curator instead of a creator. The tools are frictionless. But what if friction was\u2014is<\/em>\u2014the point?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to sound like an old curmudgeon, shaking my stylus at the cloud. I admire the ambition behind these features and the continual move towards efficiency. But I couldn\u2019t help feeling that I was in creative purgatory, too seasoned to be excited by \u201cswipe to generate,\u201d too jaded to believe that captions-as-innovation are the future of design. There\u2019s a subtle grief in feeling that you\u2019re being aged out of your own industry\u2019s evolution. Adobe made tools that pushed me to become better. Now, it felt like the tools were pushing me aside.<\/p>\n

But then something shifted.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s something melancholy about watching the messy, analog struggle of creativity give way to flawless AI generation. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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After the keynote, I had the chance to sit down with Ely Greenfield (CTO of Adobe\u2019s Digital Media business), Eric Snowden (vice president of design), and Stephen Neilson (senior product manager for Photoshop)\u2014three Adobe leaders who weren\u2019t there to sell me hype. They weren\u2019t talking heads parroting marketing jargon. Greenfield, Snowden, and Neilson spoke with honesty, passion, and a nuanced understanding of what Adobe\u2019s role has always been: not to replace creativity, but to expand it.<\/p>\n

Snowden talked about how Adobe\u2019s goal isn\u2019t to erase the professional creative, it\u2019s to build an ecosystem flexible enough to support all kinds of creators, from the student using Adobe Express for the first time to the seasoned art director running a cross-platform production pipeline. Greenfield and I discussed commercial work for all stages of design. Neilson walked me through the thoughtful way that Photoshop\u2019s generative tools are being woven into existing workflows, not shoehorned in.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Firefly Services: custom model training, brand-safe generation, and content credentials<\/a> baked into assets. These aren\u2019t gimmicks. They\u2019re serious tools, addressing the real-world needs of commercial workflows.<\/p>\n

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These leaders reminded me that Adobe isn\u2019t just trying to keep up with the creative landscape; they\u2019re actively working to shape it and investing in tools that make creativity more accessible without compromising power. Whether you\u2019re just starting out on Adobe Express or knee-deep in a Fresco-Illustrator-Lightroom workflow, there\u2019s a place for you in the ecosystem.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when it hit me: I\u2019m only a designer because of Adobe. The first time I opened Illustrator was like stepping into a language I\u2019d been waiting to speak. And while the landscape has shifted \u2014 and yes, sometimes feels unrecognizable \u2014 Adobe hasn\u2019t abandoned us.<\/p>\n

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Adobe\u2019s current marketing efforts may chase the next-gen cohort (with all its hyperactive branding and emoji-saturated optimism), but the tools are still evolving for us pros, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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That realization flipped something for me. I had come into MAX feeling like an outsider, anxious that maybe my time with Adobe had passed, that maybe I was just a relic in a shiny new creative world. But I left with a reminder that Adobe still sees us, the seasoned professionals who built our careers with their tools, the ones who remember installing fonts manually and optimizing TIFFs for press. Their current marketing efforts may chase the next-gen cohort (with all its hyperactive branding and emoji-saturated optimism), but the tools are still evolving for us pros, too.<\/p>\n

So yes, I rolled my eyes at the keynote. I grimaced at the buzzwords. And I winced when yet another update was called \u201crevolutionary\u201d when it was really just\u2026 convenient. But I also left Adobe MAX feeling that the company still values the creative process, in all its forms. Behind the marketing veneer, Adobe is still quietly doing the work of building tools to empower creatives no matter where we are in our journey.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s something melancholy about watching the messy, analog struggle of creativity give way to flawless AI generation. But I also saw heart, craft, and care. And above all, commitment.<\/p>\n

And maybe that\u2019s the most radical innovation of all: continuity in a world obsessed with disruption. Adobe MAX didn\u2019t just show me what\u2019s new, it reminded me of what\u2019s been true throughout my design career: Adobe is for creatives. All of us. Still. I have a renewed sense of excitement and curiosity to see how this landscape will evolve in the next 30 years for creative professionals.<\/p>\n

The post Adobe\u2019s Identity Crisis: Pro Tools in a Creator Economy<\/a> appeared first on PRINT Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Adobe MAX experience in London started off, well, rocky. I attended as a writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2621"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2633,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2621\/revisions\/2633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}