11/15/2025
My Top Adobe MAX 2025 Takeaways
1. AI partner models give a world of options.
Adobe’s commercially safe Firefly, but also access to a dozen (and growing) partner AI models within the apps, including Google’s super-fun-to-say "Nano Banana." Different models excel at different things—video, illustration, photorealism, music, speech, sound effects, etc.—allowing us to quickly try and compare, accelerate the creative ideation phase, and show clients multiple options.
2. Make messages more memorable with motion and sound.
- Video layers in Photoshop, including AI-generated text-to-video.
- Firefly video editor: fast, template-driven, AI-assisted video creation, with in-app music and sound effects
- Premiere Pro on mobile lets you—using just your thumb(!)—layer and transition video, audio, graphics, titles, and captions using original, stock, or AI assets. It exports to desktop for complex edits like automatic object masking or every frame with one click!
3. Let AI do the heavy lifting while we stay focused on creative thinking, direction, strategy, and relationships.
- Photoshop’s Harmonize makes pasted objects blend naturally into a scene.
- Upscale increases resolution up to 4x and adds intelligent detail.
- Layer Naming drew huge applause for auto-naming layers based on content.
- Firefly custom models can learn clients’ brand styles for faster on-brand concepts.
- Illustrator’s Turntable rotates objects as if 3D
- Improved workflows connect apps seamlessly, taking ideas from sketch to completion in less time.
4. Collaboration with AI opens possibilities and unlocks creativity, but it won’t replace us because it can't...
a) Be blob-shaped. Unlike T-shaped designers (in-depth expertise in one area, shallow across others), blob-shaped designers flex based on project needs and stretch across disciplines—strategy, storytelling, motion design, product thinking.
b) Create the unexpected. AI isn’t good at surprise, especially surprise with meaning. It’s good at patterns, randomness, and "AI slop," but not thoughtful disruption or delight.
c) Design with empathy. Humans understand emotion, relate, and translate it into design. AI can simulate behavior, but it can’t feel.
d) Tell stories that stick. We tell the why behind the work—stories with purpose and context that build connection and trust. AI can make visuals, but story makes them matter.
e) Design with craft and taste. Craft—skill and refinement—is making something high-quality, thoughtful, and accurate; taste—judgment and nuance—is understanding culture, timing, history, technology, beliefs, and what feels right. AI imitates, but lacks discernment and soul.
Plus awesome techie learnings like complex appearance-panel text effects in Illustrator while keeping text editable, and time-saving layout scripts in InDesign.
I left Adobe MAX with fresh inspiration, sharper tools, faster workflows, and a renewed focus on what only a human, blob-shaped creative can do.
