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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1513481
Creative Equity with Express Chief Strategy Officer, Scott Belsky brought up Adobe Express and a small but very enthusiastic group near the back of the hall erupted in cheers and applause. With everything Adobe has done for creative pros with its lineup of high-end desktop and mobile applications, the web-based Express can give virtually anyone access to an accessible medium to deliver the messages that are most important to them. This is particularly useful in schools and organizations that can’t fit Creative Cloud into their budget. Earlier this year, Google and Adobe jointly announced joint support for Express on the Chromebook, the laptop of choice for many K12 school districts. Express’s new Generative AI features simplifies moving your creation to a variety of media and aspect ratios. Its advanced collaboration features should put Express on creative professionals’ radar. You can pull in content from virtually any of Adobe’s pro application and push it out to just about anywhere via your Library. Creative Cloud Evangelist Paul Trani demonstrated this, opening by showing how easy it is to import an Illustrator image with its main component groups intact. He then showed a variety of new animation options available with just a mouse click. The selected objects can now link back to the application that created them if more editing is needed. Adobe Express Evangelist Katrina Torrijos assisted with the shared custom template and collaboration demos and she was also welcomed by the same enthusiastic cheering section. She also showed off Express’s Content Scheduler that provides a dashboard to control when your campaign’s media debuts and expires on all your social planforms. It boasts drag and drop and takes just one click to bring the contact back into Express for editing and updating. Torrijos went on to demonstrate Firefly’s other new model, Text to Template. This allows a user to create an Express template from a text prompt, pulling graphics, fonts, color schemes together to give your idea a very powerful kick start. As the prompts get more detailed and complex, the results become even more jaw-dropping. In the tradition of “And wait there’s more!” Express can also instantly translate any text in your creation into a variety of languages. In the short time since last year’s MAX conference, Generative AI has become a particularly hot topic, particularly among creators and artists of all stripes. That may be part of the reason why this year’s opening keynote felt a tad lower key compared to previous years. Throughout the presentations, Adobe was treading carefully in how it was framing Firefly to its customers. It kept stressing the rapidly, perhaps exponentially growing demand for content of all sorts. By integrating Firefly features into its products, it was providing an assistant for one’s workflow not a replacement for the eye and imagination of the creator. And it was standing by strict, ethical guidelines for how Gen AI is trained, used, and identified. Concerns will obviously persist among its creative customers, few of whom are protected by the powerful Hollywood guilds who just beginning to resolve their months long strikes that were motivated in part by possible threats to their careers sparked by Gen AI advances. But however this plays out, Adobe’s kinder and gentler approach to Generative AI is clearly mindful of its customer’s concerns. It knows it took a huge step when going from the assistive AI powers of its Sensi features to the generative marvels of Firefly. Hopefully, more big players will follow Adobe’s example and move forward with a wider view than just the corporate bottom line.