#AdobeMax2022

Dispatches From L.A.

The Creativity Conference

By Pippa Johnstone and Dominic Girard

The team behind ‘Wireframe with Khoi Vinh’ is in L.A. this week for the Adobe Max Creativity Conference. This is a glimpse into what caught their attention on Day 1.

(Dominic) Among creatives, Adobe’s MAX Conference is legendary for upping the game on what a conference should look and feel like. And, honestly, one day in, we believe it.

Unsurprisingly, the set design for the keynote stage here at Adobe’s annual creativity conference is best-in-class. The digital walls pop with elaborately designed 3D staircases, bold colour swatches, and collages underscoring all the exciting things this brand is proud to announce this year.

(Pippa) Dom and I are delighted to be here. We’ve been producing Adobe’s Wireframe podcast since 2020. (Fun fact: thanks to… events of the last couple of years… this is the first time I am meeting our client lead, Lindsay Munro, in real life. And it’s only the second time for Dom.)

So we’re here to rep for Adobe’s podcast (which you should listen to right here) and find out how a creativity conference inspires designers, artists, and corporate suits to re-invest in how they work and make things.

(Dom) Adobe’s steadfast commitment to making sure everyone — professionals and enthusiasts alike — can use Adobe’s tools to make great work is obvious on day one of this conference. (Incidentally, that’s a big theme in the podcast’s latest season. Have you heard it?) For example, artificial intelligence is heavily baked into everything they’re talking about here today, which puts expert photo retouching, digital illustration, and 3D artwork within reach for even an audio dude like (thumb to me) this guy (thumb to me).

I can’t help but think about how their approach to video and visual storytelling would play nice with any aspiring producer looking to complement their podcast with a video strategy that is more compelling than, say, turning an audio product into a TV chat show but I digress.

(Pippa) Brands are talking a lot about how they’ve rebuilt their teams to spool up and publish a lot more content, on a lot more platforms, as quickly as they can.

Showtime’s Paul Nicholson talked about how they were inundated with more requests for content during the pandemic than their creative team could handle. So they completely rebuilt how they work together.

They refreshed the Showtime logo in a way that makes it effortless to frame their TV content for the needs of any platform’s format. He says “your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.” Which, I should point out, obviously includes audio platforms and podcasts.

(Dom) Adobe is talking about this too. The pandemic accelerated an urgency to be able to quickly scale content for any platform, and Adobe thinks they’ve solved it for creatives. The applause I heard in the audience during the keynote suggests a lot of creators agree.

(Pippa) Yeah, even that Insta360 camera guy we met in the “Community Pavilion” has an action camera that anybody — including someone like me who knows nothing about photography — can use to edit video and publish in minutes. It’s another push showing how clever AI can eliminate a lot of the busy work for anyone trying to tell a good story.

(Dom) Yeah. It’s all about liberating us to sweat less over how to package content, and instead focus more of our brains and time on, you know, creating things.

(Pippa) It reminds me a bit of how our own company has embraced something like Descript to streamline our post-production and get our audio content out to clients for review way faster than we used to.

Look out for another dispatch from Pippa and Dom tomorrow. Follow their experience here and on our IG.

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