Adobe MAX London 2025
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.
