Comp in Action With: Jenean Morrison and the Make It (On) Mobile Gang
Want to know what happened when Adobe brought together a crew of design pros and a bunch of tablets? Total. Mobile. Magic.
Earlier this year, a group of 16 designers, illustrators, and photographers came together in New York City for Adobe’s inaugural Make It On Mobile (MIoM) event, a two-day symposium designed to stimulate big creative thinking on compact devices.
Equipped with iPad Pros and Apple Pencils, everyone was paired off and given a brief to complete over the course of back-to-back afternoons: Come up with a catchy motto that conveyed some kind of core truth about the way they work, then use their tools — tablets and Adobe apps — to turn it into a visually compelling poster.
Each arrived with varying levels of familiarity — and general comfort — with those tools. “I think that it’s pretty common for people to assume these devices or the iOS aren’t capable or powerful enough to replace, or even actively supplement, all the things they can do on their desktop,” says David Macy (he’s the Director of Product Management — and he masterminded and emceed the convening).
Part of his goal in bringing everyone together was to shift those general misconceptions from skepticism-of-what-tablets-and-mobile-apps-maybe-can’t-do, to wonder-and-excitement-over-what-they-actually-can; but it was also important to introduce the idea that incorporating these on-the-go devices and platforms into day-to-day workflows can dramatically change how they brainstorm, produce, and refine their projects IRL.
Out of all the apps — including Photoshop Sketch CC, Mix CC, and Fix CC; Capture CC, Illustrator Draw CC — Comp CC was a fresh digital frontier for most, and represented an opportunity for us to do something that we love: Introduce our app to newbies.
Jeanean Morrison was one of those newbs. We caught up with her after the fact and learned a bit more about her process.
Hi Jenean! For folks who aren’t familiar with your work — which is fantastic, and everyone should check it out! — how do you kind of describe what you do to other people?
I’m a surface and textile designer. Primarily that means that I’m making art for products: everything from fabric to rugs, napkins to paper plates, home decor to coloring books. That’s my focus.
What tools and mediums do you work with most regularly?
I used to do a lot of hand-drawn work — pen on paper first, scan and clean up after. Then, I discovered the iPad! These days, I start with Adobe Illustrator Draw, and send to Illustrator CC. It’s just that one step quicker.
So you went into MIoM pretty confident in tablets and how to use them. How did the apps enable you to simplify or streamline your collaboration with your partner for the workshop, Andrea Pippins?
Andrea and I were working pretty closely side by side, loading files to a shared Creative Cloud Library. She also brought in drawings that she had done — some of which ended up in my design’s final grid, others that I turned into brushes in Capture, which I then took into Sketch.
You learned how to navigate Comp to establish the layout of your design, which was laid out like a kind of patchwork. How did you find that experience?
Usually I’ll just do a single design, rather than a full layout — plus this was the first time I incorporated words into a larger wireframe. But I wanted to see how far I could get doing everything on the iPad from start to finish, and specifically wanted to see how far I could get within Comp. Andrea and I are both into fabrics, and had talked about doing some sort of quilt-type thing, which is how we got the concept for the grid. That was easy, but when I turned it on its side to get the diamonds, I couldn’t quite align them the way I wanted to. I had to check the little in-app tutorials a few times, but found everything pretty straightforward to pick up.
Awesome. Let’s have a look at your design!
Jenean wasn’t the only one who used Comp in a final project: Here are the posters from other attendees who made magic with our app:
- Gemma O’Brien
Comp is free (!) for Creative Cloud subscribers* — download it now for your iPhone or iPad. Not yet a Creative Cloud member? Sign up for a FREE Adobe ID today and try out the latest CC apps too.
*Android users, we’ve just released a beta version of the app! Click here to become part of the pre-release program.
Check out our growing visual gallery for how-tos and at-a-glance guidance on navigating Comp.
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