My Adobe MAX experience in London started off, well, rocky. I attended as a writer for PRINT, but I’m also a professional designer, and it’s this latter identity I couldn’t ignore during the two-hour keynote. It felt like a caffeinated sales pitch: a lot of hype, a little love. “Awesome” was the word of the hour. Everything was innovative and empowering. But for a longtime creative like me, it felt more like déjà vu. I sat through the demos — Scene-to-Image, Text-to-Video, Firefly Video model — and felt a growing disconnect. Adobe once represented the serious, sometimes messy, world of professional design. Now it felt like the company was chasing a generation of drag-and-drop creators raised on templates, not technique.
As I watched Firefly Boards remix images with third-party integrations and AI tools churn out video captions and multilingual voiceovers, I found myself wondering: Is this innovation, or just iteration?
The updates across Creative Cloud were extensive. Photoshop got another boost with improved generative fill and expand, and Illustrator added quick-click swatches and mockup tools (although I’m certain I’ve already seen the demos). Premiere Pro now includes transcript-based caption generation and multilingual voiceovers via Firefly Video. Project Neo teased a 3D type tool. Adobe Express lets you add motion and audio with drag-and-drop ease. Fresco continues inching closer to being a Procreate clone. Lightroom now lets you post to Instagram directly from mobile. It’s all … fine. But are these updates really moving us forward?
Adobe describes all this as “next-gen creative access,” web and mobile-first tools designed for a world where creativity happens on the go, on any surface. It’s convenience, not craft: when every app becomes a remix generator, every designer becomes a curator instead of a creator. The tools are frictionless. But what if friction was—is—the point?
I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon, shaking my stylus at the cloud. I admire the ambition behind these features and the continual move towards efficiency. But I couldn’t help feeling that I was in creative purgatory, too seasoned to be excited by “swipe to generate,” too jaded to believe that captions-as-innovation are the future of design. There’s a subtle grief in feeling that you’re being aged out of your own industry’s evolution. Adobe made tools that pushed me to become better. Now, it felt like the tools were pushing me aside.
But then something shifted.
There’s something melancholy about watching the messy, analog struggle of creativity give way to flawless AI generation.
After the keynote, I had the chance to sit down with Ely Greenfield (CTO of Adobe’s Digital Media business), Eric Snowden (vice president of design), and Stephen Neilson (senior product manager for Photoshop)—three Adobe leaders who weren’t there to sell me hype. They weren’t talking heads parroting marketing jargon. Greenfield, Snowden, and Neilson spoke with honesty, passion, and a nuanced understanding of what Adobe’s role has always been: not to replace creativity, but to expand it.
Snowden talked about how Adobe’s goal isn’t to erase the professional creative, it’s to build an ecosystem flexible enough to support all kinds of creators, from the student using Adobe Express for the first time to the seasoned art director running a cross-platform production pipeline. Greenfield and I discussed commercial work for all stages of design. Neilson walked me through the thoughtful way that Photoshop’s generative tools are being woven into existing workflows, not shoehorned in.
And then there’s Firefly Services: custom model training, brand-safe generation, and content credentials baked into assets. These aren’t gimmicks. They’re serious tools, addressing the real-world needs of commercial workflows.
These leaders reminded me that Adobe isn’t just trying to keep up with the creative landscape; they’re actively working to shape it and investing in tools that make creativity more accessible without compromising power. Whether you’re just starting out on Adobe Express or knee-deep in a Fresco-Illustrator-Lightroom workflow, there’s a place for you in the ecosystem.
And that’s when it hit me: I’m only a designer because of Adobe. The first time I opened Illustrator was like stepping into a language I’d been waiting to speak. And while the landscape has shifted — and yes, sometimes feels unrecognizable — Adobe hasn’t abandoned us.
Adobe’s current marketing efforts may chase the next-gen cohort (with all its hyperactive branding and emoji-saturated optimism), but the tools are still evolving for us pros, too.
That realization flipped something for me. I had come into MAX feeling like an outsider, anxious that maybe my time with Adobe had passed, that maybe I was just a relic in a shiny new creative world. But I left with a reminder that Adobe still sees us, the seasoned professionals who built our careers with their tools, the ones who remember installing fonts manually and optimizing TIFFs for press. Their current marketing efforts may chase the next-gen cohort (with all its hyperactive branding and emoji-saturated optimism), but the tools are still evolving for us pros, too.
So yes, I rolled my eyes at the keynote. I grimaced at the buzzwords. And I winced when yet another update was called “revolutionary” when it was really just… convenient. But I also left Adobe MAX feeling that the company still values the creative process, in all its forms. Behind the marketing veneer, Adobe is still quietly doing the work of building tools to empower creatives no matter where we are in our journey.
There’s something melancholy about watching the messy, analog struggle of creativity give way to flawless AI generation. But I also saw heart, craft, and care. And above all, commitment.
And maybe that’s the most radical innovation of all: continuity in a world obsessed with disruption. Adobe MAX didn’t just show me what’s new, it reminded me of what’s been true throughout my design career: Adobe is for creatives. All of us. Still. I have a renewed sense of excitement and curiosity to see how this landscape will evolve in the next 30 years for creative professionals.
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