What I took away from Adobe MAX 2023

This year, I was lucky enough to attend the Adobe MAX conference here in Los Angeles. As someone who is obsessed not only with Adobe products, but with creativity as a discipline, I was stoked.

I went into the conference hoping to soak in as much creative inspiration, advice, and connection as I could. And I was not disappointed.

Here are some of the most valuable lessons I took away from the 3 days:

Being process agnostic

I sat in on Wix Motion Studio’s presentation on celebrating individuals in a collaborative creative process, and I was actually surprised by something that I took to heart.

As a huge process person, I’m typically all for creating a super reliable process that you can use over and over again. But this presentation made a really strong case for not approaching every project in the same way.

Depending on the scope of the project — what you need to do, the timeline, what skillsets you need — the way you can most effectively tackle it can be different every single time.

One really great example of this was a project where they wanted a really fresh perspective. So instead of aligning at the outset and then giving each person the “lane” that they could dominate, they worked in more of a popcorn manner. People worked on something, then once they hit a wall, they hand it off to someone else and move onto a different piece.

The chaos of this actually worked really well in this situation, giving the team the ability to approach things with fresh eyes when they felt burnt out on something, but it also led to an end product that had so many different fingerprints on every piece.

Especially when dealing with unfamiliar territories like they were in this project, combining all of the team member’s skillsets in this unique way can help you to identify solutions you wouldn’t otherwise.

Although I’m still a big process girl — and the Wix team mentioned that they wouldn’t do this with every single project either and try to find a good balance between traditional and experimental proc esses— I’m definitely more open to straying from my norm every once in a while to get really creative.

One for you, one for the algorithm

The inspiration keynotes were incredible this year. Every session ended with me feeling insanely inspired, but Karen X Cheng’s session about “the artist vs. the algorithm” especially stuck out to me.

Not only did I love the storytelling approach that she took to her presentation, but what she advocated for was especially relevant to my current struggles.

She talked about the high that she got from positive engagement on social media — the likes, the shares the comments — and the subsequent addiction to it. When you become accustomed to this serge of validation, when something flops, you almost physically feel the disappointment and self-judgment.

And in pursuit of continuing to get this positive engagement, you start doing things to “feed’ the algorithm, instead of things that fill you up creatively.

But of course, if you’re trying to make a living off your creativity, you do need to play the game to some extent. So she likes to work by the motto of “one for the algorithm, one for me.” The exact ratio can depend on your exact situation (i.e. if you’re just starting out and need that engagement, maybe do 5 for the algorithm, one for you), but the gist is that when you’re doing something “for you,” you’re giving it permission in advance for it to flop.

You’re not putting any pressure on this content to perform. It’s valuable because you learned something and you spent good creative energy doing it. Not because of the likes or shares it got.

I love this piece of advice, because it’s practical — i.e. most people can’t create just for the sake for creating all the time — but it can help you prevent burnout, have a pressure-free creative outlet, and help tamper self consciousness about your art.

Gift yourself a creative project

Fresh off the inspiration from Karen X Cheng’s keynote, I walked into Andrew Hochradel’s session about his passion project that ended up turning into a full campaign with Southwest Airlines. And it gave me some really incredible extra fuel for a great opportunity for “for me” projects.

Every year, he gifts himself the opportunity to create something that is solely for him. He gives himself time and budget, and he won’t allow himself to make any money from it. Any profit he gets needs to be invested directly back into the project.

One year, his birthday project ended up turning into a 3 year ordeal. It started out with him sketching up some merch ideas and tweeting them to Southwest, carried on with him badgering them with new designs he created any time he took a new flight, and ended with the release of an actual merch line and complete creative direction of the marketing campaign.

It was just so inspiring that what started as just a desire to make something up and have fun turned into a full-blown collaboration with one of his favorite brands.

But what was even more inspiring to me was the fact that he regularly invested in his own creativity. I think putting a process behind his “birthday present” to himself, setting aside both the budget and time, helps him keep that creative magic alive inside of him.

Now I’m not saying that I’m going to turn a personal birthday project into a 3 year thing with a global brand, but I definitely am going to be more intentional in allowing myself to do a full project just for fun at least once a year.

This was really just scratching the surface. My iPad is filled with pages and pages of notes that I can’t wait to apply to my own creative practice.

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