Adobe MAX London 2025
Another day, another international speech… 😜 I went back to the UK for this year’s Adobe MAX London.
Silent disco!
Less than a week after getting home from Creative South, I was back on a plane heading to Adobe MAX London!
Last year (2024) I went to do an Adobe Live stream from this one-day conference at Battersea Park. This year MAX was held at a new venue, The Magazine which is right next door to the O2 in Greenwich. I actually used to live down the road in Blackheath, so this was a trip down memory lane for me as I traversed the streets I used to run on while training for the London Marathon.
Coincidentally enough, the conference was held on the Thursday before this year’s marathon, so my hotel was surrounded by joggers getting in those last-minute miles.
It was only fitting that I included this Greenwich/London Marathon reference in my speech this year, titled Turning Likes to Leads; Navigating Social Media as a Designer. This was a 45-minute speech I performed to a dark room of about 200 people, each wearing a set of headphones, silent disco-style. This was a unique situation for me, and it was necessary because the other speeches were right next door, screened off by only a curtain (meaning any audio would have leaked through and disrupted the other talks).
On top of this I also ran a 30-minute live stream on the Adobe Live Youtube channel, where I was asked to do some creative exploration using Adobe Firefly. I’ll be honest, anytime I mention generative AI in my videos, the response is… mixed. People generally don’t respond well its use, so I was nervous about this one.
I decided to run a tutorial on how I use Firefly to make a colouring in book for my children (the most innocent use of AI I could think of). We made 6 colouring sheets in a black and white line drawing style using real prompts from my kids. E.g. “black and white line drawing, vector art of a stegosaurus wearing roller skates”. I then turned this into a zine using an A4 sheet of paper, and Clara Galan (host) and I folded and cut these live on camera.
It felt like an episode of Blue Peter, where I brought out a “here’s one I made earlier” sheet and we cut and folded the zines together.
Ahead of the event, and in and around rehearsals, I also attended a full day design summit with the Adobe Community team, where I got a sneak peek at some of the new features coming out in Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. It was also an opportunity to hang out with some of my Instagram design pals, including Ollie Spicer, Robin Son, Jack Watson, Morgan Hastie, Abi Lee and then eventually CJ Cawley showed up for the main conference! FYI, these guys all sat front row for my talk. 👊
But best of all was catching up with Liz Mosley, who ran two of her own talks this year and as nervous as she was, she absolutely crushed it. We rode cabs all over London going back and forth between rehearsals and had a right old natter!
I rounded up the week with the mother of all nights out, starting out with drinks with Bart Van de Wiele and Rob de Winter, chatting all things process and presentations. Then Kladi Vergine hosted us for dinner (thank you Kladi) where I sat with my old mate Tony Harmer and met the lovely Tigz Rice. I then went for a quick drink at the O2 with the ‘design-fluencers’ (CJ, Robin, Morgan and co), before wrapping up the evening for a night cap with the Adobe keynote speakers and senior team in the hotel bar, including Paul Trani, Elise Swopes, Lucy Street and Kelly Weldon.
Special shout out to Michael Fugoso and the wildly talented Kei Meguro (all the way from Tokyo) and their pal Joe Allam, who looked after me the entire week. It was so fun hanging out with you all.
Creative South 2025
I left this conference about 5kg heavier, with a suitcase full of stickers and bunch of new friends.
Meeting my hero Allan Peters
I first heard about Creative South from my friend Dave Clayton after our podcast together in 2022. After our interview he started raving about this design conference in America, where everyone hugs you, you get stuffed with great food and you get to watch talks and do workshops with absolute design legends.
A couple of years later, my friends Kristy Campbell and James Martin are there as speakers. Kristy posts a teary vlog on her social media about how wonderful this conference is; about how you ‘come as friends and leave as family’.
So when the wonderful Mike Jones, founder of Creative South, invited me to do a speech at this year’s conference in Columbus, Georgia, I jumped at the chance.
I went via Canada because it was $1000 cheaper! That turned out to be a big mistake… 😬
The first hurdle was the distance. This was a monumental trip, which started on the Gold Coast, went through Vancouver and on to Montreal where I missed my connection and ended up staying the night. Then a flight to Atlanta, followed by an hour long bus journey to Columbus. It took 56 hours, door-to-door, and it was brutal.
But when I finally arrived at my hotel at 1am, Mike was in the lobby waiting to give me my first of many hugs that week.
If you’ve never met Mike before, he’s a 6’ 4” man mountain (former football player) and when he hugged me I felt like a baby. By the end of the week (and after a few drinks), Mike would be picking me up and carrying me like a Disney Princess. He is huge, and would be incredibly intimidating, if it weren’t for the fact that he is one of the warmest and most-generous people on the planet.
On stage performing my speech
Creative South is a two-day event, packed with speeches from design legends from all over the globe. I would be joining the likes of the lovely Elle and Arabella from Weekend Creative (who I’d met a couple of times at Adobe MAX), Mike and Chara from the legendary Smith & Diction, Katie and Ilana from Goodtype, Scott Fuller from Studio Temporary and Dan Lee, an incredibly-talented lettering artist who I’ve followed for some time.
But the highlight for me was to finally meet my hero Allan Peters in person.
Allan and I have become fast friends over the past couple of years (Al leaves me the cutest voice notes on a regular basis), but we’ve never met, so to hang out with him IRL was a true blessing (we ended playing darts and Mario Kart on the last night until the early hours).
On top of this, Shawn and Massimo from the Angry Designers Podcast were there all week. And I spent almost the entire trip hanging out with these two, from the bus journey in, recording two live podcast episodes and many many drinks.
As someone who lives on the other side of the planet, I found myself in familiar company among friends and colleagues I’ve had the pleasure of chatting to and working with over the past few years. And it was a truly wonderful experience getting to know everybody. There was a huge range of creative people there, from students just getting started (and working with the Creative South Foundation) to older, more-experience professionals looking to recharge their creative batteries.
I ran my Beyond the PSD Template workshop on the first day to a room full of designers hungry to learn about levelling up their Photoshop game and making customised mockups for their logo clients. And on day two, the enegmatic Andrew Hochradel introduced me on stage where I would perform my talk, See One Do One Teach One: Master your software by sharing your learnings.
Everything went down without a hitch and I left the conference about 5kg heavier, with a bunch of new friends and a suitcase full of stickers.
P.S. Check out this wonderful sketch note of my speech, created by Alejo Porras…
Metalama picks up five awards
This project with Postsharp Technologies is one of the proudest logos I’ve completed.
My project with Postsharp Technologies has picked up a number of awards, including a coveted AGDA Merit recognition, which is the Australian Graphic Design Association.
AGDA Awards 2024 - Merit Award, Logos, Trademarks & Symbols
ODA Awards 2024 - Winner in Brand Strategy
ODA Awards 2024 - Gold in Brand Identity
Indigo Awards 2024 - Gold in Branding for Technology
Titan Brand Awards 2024 - Gold for Best Logo Design / Best Brand Identity
PostSharp and Metalama are two frameworks that help software developers improve their code quality and productivity through meta-programming. President & Principal Engineer Gael Fraiteur needed help branding the new product, Metalama, in a way that harmonised with the current branding for PostSharp, which already had a lot of traction in the market. So I’d need to stick to the current colours and fonts, but introduce a new icon for Metalama, which would be the flagship product moving forward.
One of the requirements from Gael’s brief was that the logo shouldn’t be too playful. It was very tempting to come up with illustrated concepts that depicted a llama, but in the end I would need to find a solution that reflected the industry, but would be taken seriously.
The ‘sharp’ # symbol in the parent company name represented the C# programming language that the framework is used for. And I managed to find an abstract llama shape inside a stylised version of a # symbol. By introducing small separations in the design, we could keep the overall shape of the symbol, while revealing the llama icon in a subtle way.
Adobe MAX Miami 2024
Three speeches, an 18,000 mile round trip and a T-Pain concert thrown in to boot. What a whirlwind.
I was lucky enough to be invited back to the world’s biggest design conference as a headline speaker this year, and boy… what a whirlwind.
After a brutal jet-lag experience last year, I learned from my lesson and set off early for Miami, sleeping pills at hand and made the 9000 mile trip from Australia ahead of the conference.
This year Adobe hosted 10,000 attendees at the Miami Beach Convention Centre for three days of keynotes, speaker sessions, labs and a chance to hang out with everyone on the Creative Park Floor.
After the success of my 15-minute slot at the end of the Graphic Design Super Session last year, I was given my own room in 2024 and a full hour to entertain an audience of ~500 people! My speech was titled, ‘See One, Do One, Teach One’ and it was based around the ‘learn by teaching’ theme, and sharing what you know to build up our industry. You can watch the session in full here.
Once I was done I ran over to the Creative Theatre to sit with Kristy Campbell for our Q&A on ‘Harnessing the Power of Social Media’.
I’ll never get over what a spectacle this event is. From the sheer number of attendees, to the fantastic connections you build, to the inevitable sticker haul (stickers are currency), Adobe MAX never fails to impress me. And as someone who spends their time in a tiny home studio on the other side of the world, this event is the one time of the year that I feel like somewhat of a celebrity. It’s a strange experience (there was a line to meet me at the end of my speech) and something I’ll never quite get over.
Here’s a wrap up video, including getting to hang out with all of the keynote speakers, bumping into the likes of Aaron Draplin, Clark Orr, Colin and Samir, Chris Do and many more absolute legends from our creative world —>
My biggest interview yet!
Boy I was nervous for this one…
Boy I was nervous for this one…
Once again, I was privileged enough to get to sit down and chat with one of my heroes in the field. If you don’t know Chris Do, he’s a former agency owner and the founder of a group called The Futur; an enterprise that strives to educate designers and creatives on how to make the most out of their careers.
As a designer and a freelancer, I was never taught the business side of the creative industry. So in the infancy of my small business, I looked to Chris for the answers. His content was one of the main reasons I decided to niche down into logo design.
This was a full circle moment for me. I’ve been lucky enough to meet Chris in person a couple of times, and let’s be honest, he’s an intimidating guy. And his podcast is one of the most listened-to titles in the marketing space. So I was extremely nervous during this interview. And you can tell because Chris was able to convince me to share some specifics around the financials of my business.
Check out the interview in full on Youtube here…
Adobe MAX London 2024
I was lucky enough to be invited to Adobe MAX London 2024, and while I was there I ran a 30-minute live session with Michael Fugoso.
I was lucky enough to be invited back to my old stomping ground for Adobe MAX London, where I ran a live stream with the Adobe Live team.
Fresh off the stage from the keynote, Michael Fugoso hosted our session, titled Speed Up Your Editing with AI in Premiere Pro.
In this session we focussed on the brand new editing features inside the Beta release of Premiere Pro, including working with some of the AI editing capabilities (not generative AI, that hadn’t been released yet!).
Here we looked at the new enhance speech feature, the remix tool, editing your video via the automatically generated transcript and more!
I was also invited to a pre-event summit where I was lucky enough to try out an advanced copy of the new Photoshop! Here’s a recap of this whirlwind trip…