Adobe Max: 10th Annual Conference Highlights The Future Of Design And Innovation

Adobe Systems Incorporated ADBE kicked off its annual Adobe Max conference this week in San Diego. Adobe Max is a creative conference in its tenth year, highlighting the future of creativity and design through the company’s extensive software tools. The event has become a Silicon Valley staple, and this year marks the largest Max event ever.

Adobe has been having a solid year from a stock perspective, up over 13 percent year-to-date. The company has used its Max event to highlight new features and applications for its users.

“Our future products are built on a cloud data approach, allowing you to create when and where you want. The Cloud native approach we are taking in the future enables richer collaboration,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager of digital media.

Adobe Sensei, Spark, Felix And Creative Cloud

The Creative Cloud Application 17 is the biggest release from this year’s event. Adobe also introduced Sensei, the company’s foray into Artificial Intelligence.

“The ecosystem that is built on the marketing cloud, there is no way in this day in age that a company innovates at the pace at which we are,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.

Adobe’s new Project Felix uses artificial intelligence to allow designers to create hyper-realistic 3D images. Project Felix’s beta launches this year.

Adobe has also introduced a new photo recognition feature in its highly popular Photoshop app to let users quickly search similar images through Adobe Stock assets; the crowd at Max was highly impressed with this new feature.

New feature Spark, an innovative web and mobile solution for sharing social media content, also allows users to quickly optimize photos that format well across all the different social media platforms.

Reuters + Adobe

Adobe has also announced a partnership with Reuters through its Adobe Stock feature.

“This is going to be a huge asset to Adobe stock,” said Lamkin.

The new partnership will feature over 18 million high quality photos from Reuters into Adobe Stock and will be adding nearly 4,000 photos daily.

Executive Q&A

Narayen spoke on the future outlook of software, saying that gauging user sentiment is incredibly important. He highlighted the importance of new software having the ability to gauge what users want. “You learn from the community of users,” Narayen explained, instead of predicting what consumers want.

“We believe the future is in domain specific knowledge, that’s our approach because it is serving communities with domain specific knowledge,” Narayen added.

The tenth annual Adobe Max conference runs throughout the week, with Quentin Tarantino headlining as a keynote speaker Thursday.