Hello from Taipei, I want to share with you my recent experience at a design conference. Being an a smallish island, Taiwan has limited design learning opportunities, but thanks to Mozilla’s training program I was able to attend the Adobe Max conference, in Los Angeles. It was a great experience to venture into a different culture and to meet designers from different fields at once.
Adobe MAX is a creativity conference held in Los Angeles in October 2015. More than 7,000 people from all over the world gather together. The conference runs for three full days. It’s like a designers’ candy land because it’s full with inspirational and iconic speakers (such as Maira Kalman, Baz Luhrmann, Elle Luna, Brandon Stanton), various sessions, labs, creative workshop and the MAX keynotes! This was my first time attending this design conference. I was super excited to join the conference where I can learn about new products, technology and industry trends.
One of the keynote’s major announcement was the debut of Adobe’s new user experience and user interface design application, currently being developed under the codename Project Comet. It allows you to design and build interactive prototypes in a vector environment. It lets you takes your UX designs from start to finish with the cross-platform app — wireframing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping, previewing and sharing. As a UX designer, one of our challenges right now is that we’re looking for a easy-to-use tool to create prototypes in order to do user testings. Then we can tweak our design and repeat the process. One of Project Comet’s features is that it could import, repeat, and mask multiple images in a single step. This feature would really help us reduce the repetitive and time-consuming work needed to build the prototype so, we could have more time to refine our design. After watching Project Comet demo, I was really looking forward to the actual product. It’s very easy for designers to use and I was impressed by the performance and quality when they showed dozens of artboards in a single Project Comet document. If you’re interested in this project, you could sign up to their mailing list for the latest Project Comet updates.
At Adobe MAX 2015, Creative Sync was a common theme in many of the demos. Creative Sync is the technology that synchronizes assets saved to your Creative Cloud account, across many of the Adobe applications. The advantage is having the ability to store the assets in a central location so that designers can reuse them across our entire design project, which is a key benefit for us, a globally distributed team.
And for those that couldn’t be there, you can now watch MAX 2015 keynotes and conference sessions on demand here.
Overall, it was such a wonderful experience to see the graphic works made by the creatives from all over the world, meeting so many creatives and the inspiring speakers. It was exciting for me to be part of Adobe MAX. Collectively, they are bringing together the world’s best creativity, experience and product innovations.
Lastly, I want to share a quote from Baz Luhrmann when he gave his talk at Adobe MAX. I feel so lucky I get to see him in person in the conference. He is one of my favorite filmmaker who directed Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001). Personally, I love the visual impact he brought to the audience in Romeo + Juliet. Luhrmann used his own style to tell a modern version of Shakespeare’s story. He attracts the audience with cinematic style with intense pace of the confrontation between two families with drastic soundtrack of contemporary music. I was fascinated by his unique way of storytelling.
“Get it out! Make something! Don’t wait for permission!!” ― Baz Luhrmann
