“We Come in Peace.” How Adobe’s Horizontal Design Initiative Is Creating Positive Change in Its Flagship Apps
In order to truly be creative, you need the right creative tools. Often, for many artists and designers, that means working with Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services — using them together to produce amazing visuals, videos, app and web experiences, and sometimes all of the above. Adobe’s users are nimble, looking at Creative Cloud’s ecosystem and learning new apps to achieve their creative goals. Adobe’s teams, on the other hand, don’t always work this fluidly across products.
“Adobe teams have traditionally been really siloed in the past, but our users are using multiple Adobe tools. The question is, how can we make that experience better for our users? This is what horizontal initiatives allow us to do,” said Rebecca Gordon. Rebecca is a design research manager on Adobe’s Unified Experience Team. Alongside her colleagues Paul Dorian and Troy Church, both senior design leads, she’s worked to create Prism, a horizontal initiative that brings new levels of consistency to the UX and UI of Adobe flagship apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
“I have a lot of empathy for our users. My ultimate goal is to help them achieve their goals and be as creative as they want to be without interrupting that, so really enabling them to achieve their…
